Evaluation of Formation Flight Control Accuracy by Flight Data of Rendezvous Docking Experiment of ETS-VII.

Abstract

: Formation flight is a new technology which enables various missions such as high resolution interferometer, virtual antenna instead of huge antenna for a large amount of communication, etc. To realize formation flight, navigation and control of relative position and velocity among related spacecraft are necessary. ETS-VII is a test satellite to perform in-orbit demonstration of autonomous rendezvous docking (RVD) technology. ETS-VII conducted three RVD experiment flights, and flew keeping definite ranges time and again. To evaluate position control accuracy of formation flight, we analyzed flight data of ETS-VII during position keeping flight. Control accuracy depends on navigation accuracy. We present the result in this paper.

FFAST: Formation Flight All Sky Telescope, Formation Flight System Analysis and Design

“…Fig.3 shows the required function of the FF system. The safety management requirement for formation flying, fault detection, retreat and re-formation, which is one of the top stage requirements, was already demonstrated in ETS-VII, 1998 7,8) . The technical level required for attitude control in FFAST was not found to be very high, and thus the attitude requirements are sufficient for the standard components of the SSS bus.…”