FIRST AUTONOMOUS RENDEZVOUS USING RELATIVE GPS NAVIGATION BY ETS-VII

Isao Kawano, Masaaki Mokuno, Toru Kasai, and Takashi Suzuki

Peer Reviewed

Abstract:	Engineering Test Satellite-VII (ETS-VII) successfully performed the world’s first autonomous rendezvous docking (RVD) flight using relative GPS (RGPS) navigation. ETS-VII is a test satellite designed to perform in-orbit demonstration of autonomous rendezvous docking technology. RGPS navigation is a form of differential GPS (DGPS), and is used as a primary means in the relative approach phase of flight farther than 500 m from the target satellite. Three methods were used to evaluate the in-orbit performance of the ETS-VII RGPS system during mating flights and rendezvous flights. The accuracy of RGPS navigation was found to be about 10 m in position and 3 cm s in velocity. This paper describes the evaluation of the in-orbit performance of RGPS during the first autonomous RVD experiment.
Published in:	NAVIGATION: Journal of the Institute of Navigation, Volume 48, Number 1
Pages:	49 - 56
Cite this article:	Kawano, Isao, Mokuno, Masaaki, Kasai, Toru, Suzuki, Takashi, "FIRST AUTONOMOUS RENDEZVOUS USING RELATIVE GPS NAVIGATION BY ETS-VII", NAVIGATION: Journal of The Institute of Navigation, Vol. 48, No. 1, Spring 2001, pp. 49-56.
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