John Van Eepoel

Pose Measurement Performance of the Argon Relative Navigation Sensor Suite in Simulated Flight Conditions

Argon is a flight-ready sensor suite with two visual cameras, a flash LIDAR, an on- board flight computer, and associated electronics. Argon was designed to provide sensing capabilities for relative navigation during proximity, rendezvous, and docking operations between spacecraft. A rigorous ground test campaign assessed the performance capability of the Argon navigation suite to measure the relative pose of high-fidelity satellite mock-ups during a variety of simulated rendezvous and proximity maneuvers facilitated by robot manipulators in a variety of lighting conditions representative of the orbital environment. A brief description of the Argon suite and test setup are given as well as an analysis of the performance of the system in simulated proximity and rendezvous operations.

A Guidance and Navigation Strategy for Rendezvous and Proximity Operations with a Noncooperative Spacecraft in Geosynchronous Orbit

The feasibility and benefits of various spacecraft servicing concepts are currently being assessed, and all require that servicer spacecraft perform rendezvous, proximity operations, and capture operations with the spacecraft to be serviced. There are many high-value commercial and military spacecraft located in geosynchronous orbit (GEO) which may be candidates for servicing, but GEO is a regime in which rendezvous and capture operations are not commonplace; further, most GEO spacecraft were not designed to be cooperative rendezvous targets, and some may even be completely nonfunctional and therefore potentially tumbling. In this work we present elements of a guidance and navigation strategy for rendezvous and proximity operations with a noncooperative spacecraft in GEO. Translational Δv is assessed for a passively safe co-elliptic rendezvous approach sequence that is followed by injection into a safety ellipse about a noncooperative tumbling spacecraft and, ultimately, final approach to capture. Covariance analysis is presented for a simulation of range and bearing measurements throughout the rendezvous and proximity operations sequence.

The HST SM4 Relative Navigation Sensor System: Overview and Preliminary Testing Results from the Flight Robotics Lab

The upcoming Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Servicing Mission 4 (SM4) includes a Relative Navigation Sensor (RNS) experiment which uses three cameras and an avionics package to record images, and estimate in real-time the relative position and attitude (aka “pose”) during the Shuttle capture and deployment of the telescope. RNS recently completed its third and final phase of testing at the Marshall Space Flight Center Flight Robotics Laboratory. This testing utilized flight spare cameras, engineering development unit avionics and flight pose algorithms to estimate the pose of a Hubble mockup mounted to the Flight Robotics Laboratory (FRL) Dynamic Overhead Target Simulator (DOTS). The mockup was moved through a variety of flight-like lighting conditions and trajectories. In this paper we present pose estimation results from the third phase of RNS FRL testing.