RELATIVE GPS NAVIGATION IMPLEMENTATION FOR THE ATV RENDEZVOUS

摘要

The ATV (Automated Transfer Vehicle) is part of the European contribution to the International Space Station. Its main task is to perform significant logistics resupply and station reboost. After its launch by the expendable Ariane 5 launcher, the ATV is designed to perform automated approach, rendezvous and docking to the ISS. From the start of the rendezvous operations lens of kilometers away from the ISS, down to the last hundreds meters of the final approach to docking, the ATV Guidance and Control uses the relative position and velocity information from the Relative GPS Navigation. This paper recalls the major features of the RGPS Navigation filter. It then focuses on the solutions selected for the implementation of the RGPS Navigation on the actual ATV cargo spaceship: compatibility between the ATV European GPS Receiver and the ISS Russian GPS receiver, accommodation of the filter computing load in the GNC computing cycle, autonomous Failure Detection, Isolation and Reconfiguration, and receivers redundancy management.