Spacecraft formation flight exploiting potential fields

The potential benefits that can be reaped from a distributed satellite system have led to the proposal of several multi-spacecraft missions by both NASA and DoD. One such benefit is the reconfigurability of these multi-spacecraft systems. This ultimately led to additional requirements being levied onto these missions, such as the general astrophysical imaging requirement for the Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) mission. Cluster reconfiguration, however, is an effort extensive operation. In this thesis, the operation of multi-spacecraft systems in three different potential fields are exploited such that spacecraft formation can be held with as little effort as possible. The first potential field considered is the Earth's gravitational field. Based upon the sparse aperture radar requirements, the terminal conditions required to keep the Air Force TechSat 21 Earth orbiting clusters in closed formations were derived. Using the Linear Quadratic formulation, the optimal reconfigurations required to initialize and resize the clusters were then determined. Based upon the current system design, the results show that both these maneuvers can be accomplished in as little as half an orbital period with the resizing maneuver costing at least 25% of the budgeted AV.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2002

Author dc:creator

• Kong, Edmund Mun Choong, 1973-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• David W. Miller.

• Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/16835

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/16835