A Survey on Formation Control of Small Satellites

Tsourdos

Progress in Aerospace Sciences

et al. 2019

104

For most atmospheric or exo-atmospheric spacecraft flight scenarios, a welldesigned trajectory is usually a key for stable flight and for improved guidance and control of the vehicle. Although extensive research work has been carried out on the design of spacecraft trajectories for different mission profiles and many effective tools were successfully developed for optimizing the flight path, it is only in the recent five years that there has been a growing interest in planning the flight trajectories with the consideration of multiple mission objectives and various model errors/uncertainties. It is worth noting that in many practical spacecraft guidance, navigation and control systems, multiple performance indices and different types of uncertainties must frequently be considered during the path planning phase. As a result, these requirements bring the development of multi-objective spacecraft trajectory optimization methods as well as stochastic spacecraft trajectory optimization algorithms. This paper aims to broadly review the state-of-the-art development in numerical multi-objective trajectory optimization algorithms and stochastic trajectory planning techniques for spacecraft flight operations. A brief description of the mathematical formulation of the problem is firstly introduced. Following that, various optimization methods that can be effective for solving spacecraft trajectory planning problems are reviewed, including the gradient-based methods, the convexification-based methods, and the evolutionary/metaheuristic methods. The multi-objective

Section: Design Of Spacecraft/satellite Formation Control Schemesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A review of optimization techniques in spacecraft flight trajectory design

Tsourdos

Progress in Aerospace Sciences

et al. 2019

104

“…For traditional TT&C and communication (TT&CC) networks, using single large spacecraft will confront the circumstance in which a breakdown of certain parts causes the failure of the whole system. As the single large spacecraft is limited by volume, mass, power constraints, reconfiguration ability, and flexibility, different small satellites are used to undertake multicomponent space assignments, and can work cooperatively as a system or network, thus requiring inter-satellite communication (ISC) and inter-satellite ranging (ISR) [ 1 , 2 ]. ISC refers to information transmission and message exchange among spacecrafts and ISR refers to measuring and evaluating relative distances among spacecrafts in a network [ 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Unbalanced QPSK-Based Integrated Communication-Ranging System for Distributed Spacecraft Networking

Zhao

Chang

Wang

et al. 2020

Sensors

The spacecraft tracking telemetering and command (TT&C) system plays an essential role in celestial and terrestrial networks, requiring relative ranging and communication, particularly in satellite formation flying networks and distributed spacecraft networks. To achieve precious ranging and high-data-rate communication in a Master/Slave satellite architecture, an integrated communication-ranging system (ICRS) is introduced. ICRS is based on the inter-satellite spread spectrum ranging and spread/non-spread spectrum communication modulated by unbalanced quadrature phase shift keying (UQPSK). In both uplink and downlink, the in-phase (I) branches and the quadrature (Q) branches undertake the tasks of ranging and communication, respectively. In addition, a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) like signal is adopted in I branches for the sake of better ranging accuracy, and binary phase shift keying (BPSK) modulation is employed in Q branches for a higher data rate. Therefore, the key point of the ICRS design is the power resource allocation between two branches via the selection of a suitable power distribution factor (PWDF). Simulation results demonstrate the good performance of the proposed approach in ranging error and bit error rate (BER). In addition, a reasonable PWDF is recommended. Furthermore, the influence of clock offset is also taken into consideration.

“…In recent years, formation flying of nanosatellites (\ 10 kg) have attracted enormous attention from space community because of advantages such as short development time, low life cycle cost, reduced risk of mission failure, as well as versatility to changing mission goals (Kristiansen and Nicklasson 2009;Hu et al 2015;Sun et al 2017). In depth review on the formation control of nanosatellites, satellite formation flying, distributed satellite systems, and fractionated satellite formation have been reported previously (Liu and Zhang 2018;Chong et al 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fabrication and preliminary testing of hydroxylammonium nitrate (HAN)-based ceramic microthruster for potential application of nanosatellites in constellation formation flying

et al. 2019

Constellation formation flying of nanosatellites (\ 10 kg) is becoming a trend for future space exploration missions. Liquid chemical micropropulsion that can provide high thrusting force for high DV orbital transfer is a crucial hardware component for successful constellation re-positioning. However, liquid chemical micropropulsion system dedicated for these nanosatellites still not currently available in the market. In this study, a microthruster was fabricated using alumina toughened zirconia (ATZ) as structural material and yttria-stabilised zirconia-graphene (YSZ-Gr) as electrode material. The device has a dimension of 1.7 cm (length) 9 1.3 cm (width) 9 0.5 cm (thickness) and weighing only 6.18 grams, comprising of five major components such as propellant reservoir, injector, electrodes, micronozzle and reaction chamber. Material characterization shows that both materials have negligible weight loss and small reduction in material hardness and fracture toughness after 20 thermal-vacuum cycles. Moreover, results from dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) ascertain that addition of graphene significantly enhanced the damping behaviour of the zirconia composite. Electrolytic decomposition of hydroxylammonium nitrate (HAN) solution in the reaction chamber has been demonstrated with maximum thrust of 180.53 mN at a propellant flow rate of 60 ll/s. The preliminary results suggest that the HAN-based ceramic microthruster could potentially be used as primary propulsion for nanosatellites in constellation formation flying.