Distributed Control of Formation Flying Spacecraft Built on OA

Abstract

This paper describes several tools and technologies that have been developed for future spacecraft formation flying missions. This includes algorithms to perform autonomous navigation and control, with new results presented for trajectory planning in highly elliptic orbits and fault detection for a distributed spacecraft system. The overall approach is embedded in the OA middleware developed by Princeton Satellite Systems, which provides a seamless integration of networking and process control with C/C++ software development. New results in this paper also demonstrate OA integrated with software that is running in hard real-time. A new multi-computer spacecraft formation flying testbed was created to simulate the performance of the full system. In particular, simulation results of an optimally initialized "recurring tetrahedron formation" on a highly elliptical orbit are shown to demonstrate both the functionality of the new testbed and the potential for creating fuel-e#cient formation configurations relevant to future magnetospheric space science.