Sho Taniguchi

Flyby navigation and guidance experiment for interplanetary micro-spacecraft PROCYON

This paper presents the planning, flight results and lessons learned of flyby guidance experiments of interplanetary micro-spacecraft PROCYON. PROCYON is the worlds first interplanetary micro-spacecraft and was launched on 3rd December, 2014. Orbital control of interplanetary micro-spacecraft is challenging because of severe restriction and lower reliability on spacecraft system. For guidance strategy of PROCYON, we have introduced an innovative guidance strategy by two-stage stochastic programming for thrust-direction-constrained problem. Although the flight experiment has many difficulties especially on navigation, the flight result shows that we successfully demonstrate that PROCYON has been guided to the target point with objective guidance accuracy, which is within 100[km] on B-plane at 3,000,000[km] distance from the Earth. These results contributes the future flyby navigation and guidance for interplanetary micro-spacecraft, which has severe constraints and lower reliability on spacecraft system.

Attitude and Orbit Prediction of IKAROS in Actual Flight Operation

The world’s first solar sail IKAROS (Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation Of the Sun) which is operated by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) lost communication with the ground station due to the power short-age on December 24, 2011. In order to acquire IKAROS again after the power comes back, we immediately initiated to predict the attitude and orbit for the spacecraft.