Distributed satellite systems is an enabling technology for many future NASA/DoD earth and space science missions, such as MMS, MAXIM, Leonardo, and LISA (1, 2, 3). While formation flying offers significant science benefits, to reduce the operating costs for these missions it will be essential that these multiple vehicles effectively act as a single spacecraft by performing coordinated observations. Autonomous guidance, navigation, and control as part of a coordinated fleet-autonomy is a key technology that will help accomplish this complex goal. This is no small task, as most current space missions require significant input from the ground for even relatively simple decisions such as thruster burns. Work for the NMP DS1 mission focused on the development of the New Millennium Remote Agent (NMRA) architecture for autonomous spacecraft control systems. NMRA integrates traditional real-time monitoring and control with components for constraint-based planning, robust multi-threaded execution, and model-based diagnosis and reconfiguration. The complexity of using an autonomous approach for space flight software was evident when most of its capabilities were stripped off prior to launch (although more capability was uplinked subsequently, and the resulting demonstration was very successful).
Agent Based Software for the Autonomous Control of Formation Flying Spacecraft
2003
20 pages
Report
No indication
English
Unmanned Spacecraft , Manned Spacecraft , Computer Software , Formation flying , Autonomous navigation , Automatic control , Applications programs(Computers) , Spacecraft control , Flight control , Guidance(Motion) , Real time operation , Space missions , Multimission modular spacecraft , Mission planning
Relative Navigation for Autonomous Formation Flying of Spacecraft
British Library Conference Proceedings | 1998
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