RECONFIGURATION MANEUVER EXPERIMENTS USING THE SPHERES TESTBED ONBOARD THE ISS

摘要

This paper presents recent results of reconfigurationrnmaneuver experiments performed onboard the InternationalrnSpace Station (ISS) using the SPHERESrntestbed of the MIT Space Systems Laboratory (SSL).rnThese experiments were designed using two differentrntwo-stage path planning algorithms previously developedrnby the authors to solve the general multispacecraftrntranslation and rotation reconfigurationrnmaneuver problem with coupled constraints. Thisrnproblem is particularly difficult because of the nonlinearityrnof the attitude dynamics, the non-convexityrnof some of the constraints, and the coupling betweenrnthe positions and attitudes of all spacecraft.rnFlight data are shown in this paper and comparedrnto the theoretical results. The success of these experimentsrnvalidate the results of the two-stage algorithms.rnThis paper also lists the lessons learnt fromrnthese experiments, which will be used to improve futurernSPHERES ISS reconfiguration maneuvers.