GPS Sensing for Spacecraft Formation Flying

Tobe’ Corazzini, Andrew Robertson, John Carl Adams, Arash Hassibi and Jonathan P. How

Abstract:	Carrier-phase Differential GPS (CDGPS) for orbit and attitude determination is emerging as a very promising low cost alternative to more conventional methods, such as sun sensors, magnetometers, and star trackers. Rel-ative spacecraft position and attitude determination are important for missions involving formation flying, such as those proposed for stellar interferometry under NASA’s New Millennium Program, and LEO missions for coor-dinated Earth observing. This paper describes research on the development of a GPS based relative position and attitude sensing system in a laboratory environment for future application on spacecraft formations. Previous pa-pers have discussed the demonstration of spacecraft ren-dezvous and capture in 2D, in a fully functional indoor GPS environment using simulated spacecraft on an air-bearing table. The work presented in this paper extends the previous GPS based sensing to a formation of three prototype spacecraft, and experimentally demonstrates very accurate real-time solutions three relative vehicle positions. (< 2 cm error) for the A trade studv of esti- ., mation algorithms and architectures is presented. Search based techniques for the carrier phase integer ambiguity resolution problem for vehicle formations are also demon-strated on simulation data.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 10th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GPS 1997) September 16 - 19, 1997 Kansas City, MO
Pages:	735 - 744
Cite this article:	Corazzini, Tobe’, Robertson, Andrew, Adams, John Carl, Hassibi, Arash, How, Jonathan P., "GPS Sensing for Spacecraft Formation Flying," Proceedings of the 10th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GPS 1997), Kansas City, MO, September 1997, pp. 735-744.
Full Paper:	ION Members/Non-Members: 1 Download Credit Sign In