Development of a suborbital flight experiment for validating a satellite inertia identification method

Abstract

For three years, students at New Mexico State University have pursued flight experiments for validation of a newly developed inertia property identification algorithm. The robotics-based algorithm was developed and studied using computer simulations only. It has not been fully validated experimentally because of the difficulty to physically test full six degrees of freedom system dynamics in microgravity conditions on the ground. In the attempt to experimentally validate the algorithm, two experiments onboard NASA's C-9 microgravity flights have been performed. Although these flight experiments have been an invaluable experience, the zero-gravity environment desired to fully validate the algorithm has not yet been achieved. The full validation requires 6 DOF, a zero-gravity motion condition which is virtually inconceivable for ground-based testing or aircraft-based testing. Therefore, the student team is developing a suborbital experiment to further test the algorithm. The experiment has been scheduled to fly in the summer of 2011. This paper describes the activities of this suborbital flight project.

Research on Algorithm for Non-Cooperative Target Inertial Parameters Identification

“…Jin lei [1] took the least square method, while Xu Wenfu [2] applied the least square method based on parameter decoupling and the non-linear system optimization based on the particle swarm optimization(PSO). Gerardo Martinez and Wilson, Rock [3,4,5]adopted the recursive least-square method (RLS) respectively and the RLS is proved to be of little computation , fast speed and can perform real-time online application [6].This paper builds a non-cooperative target identification physical model and focuses on the equation algorithm. The least square method and the RLS are adopted for simulation and analysis.…”