OPTIMAL SPACE EFFECTS: DRIVING FUTURE MILITARY GNC TECHNOLOGY NEEDS

摘要

This work builds on current exquisite performance in a variety of spacecraft components, subsystems, and algorithms in very demanding guidance, navigation, and control applications through flowing future national interest goals into satellite platform technology requirements within plausible constellation constructs identified along the way. Rather than hypothesizing new developments at the component and algorithm level, the paper focuses on the underlying rationale and methods for pushing the state-of-the-art GNC subsystems for space, from identifying future military challenges, to meeting planned threats with robust space effects (i.e. precise navigation and timing; intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance collection), the carefully designed, analyzed, integrated, and tested satellite systems usually work as well as expected on orbit and generally demonstrate robust performance in the presence of space environmental uncertainties. However, the latest complication is that each satellite must continually calculate power, energy, bandwidth, memory storage and thermal constraints - and then "play forward" in, for example, a receding horizon optimal control construct that calculates the next move in an infinite game of space chess. The remainder of this work, then, initiates this investigation through identifying constellation constructs, addressing the utility optimal algorithms have on advancing the state-of-the-art while still leveraging today's hardware with minimal changes, demonstrates how this all works with a single ISR small satellite slewing maneuver, and presents future tasks needed to adequately evolve these steps from concept to reality, noting that each optimization step, however simplified, places new GNC requirements upon space mission designers and developers.