Automated Transfer Vehicle Flight Dynamics System Lessons Learnt

摘要

On March 23rd 2012, the third ESA Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), called Edoardo Amaldi, lifted off from Kourou aboard the Ariane 5 launcher towards the International Space Station (ISS) to which it docked on March 28th. ATV is designed to provide the crew with food and materials, ISS with propellant gas and water, to rise up the ISS altitude by several re-boosts and finally to unload ISS waste for a final burning into the atmosphere. The first mission, Jules Verne, had to demonstrate its capability to dock autonomously and safely to the ISS. So, it included additional mission phases as rendezvous demonstration days. The second mission, Johannes Kepler, was the first "recurrent mission". It docked directly to the ISS after an 8 days direct phasing to ISS. Thanks to the two first missions, FDS (Flight Dynamics Subsystem) has learnt lessons and implemented them. They cover various topics, such as mission analysis, software, operational baseline, procedures and manning. This paper describes the different lessons learnt by FDS and how their implementation allowed to optimize and simplify the operations.