PROBA-3: Precise formation flying demonstration mission

摘要

Formation Flying (FF) has generated a strong interest in many space applications, most of them involving a significant complexity for building for example on-board large "virtual structures or distributed observatories". The implementation of these complex formation flying missions with critical dependency on this new, advanced and critical formation technology requires a thorough verification of the system behaviour in order to provide enough guarantees for the target mission success. A significant number of conceptual or preliminary designs, analyses, simulations, and HW on-ground testing have been performed during the last years, but still the limitations of the ground verification determine that enough confidence of the behaviour of the formation flying mission will only be possible by demonstration in flight of the concept and the associated technologies. PROBA-3 is the mission under development at ESA for in-flight formation flying demonstration, dedicated to obtain that confidence and the necessary flight maturity level in the formation flying technologies for those future target missions. PROBA-3 will demonstrate technologies such as formation metrology sensors (from very coarse to highest accuracy), formation control and GNC, system operability, safety, etc. During the last years, PROBA-3 has evolved from the initial CDF study at ESA, to two parallel phase A studies, followed by a change in the industrial configuration for the Bridging step between A and B phases. Currently the SRR consolidation has been completed, and the project is in the middle of the phase B. After the phase A study SENER and GMV were responsible for the Formation Flying System, within a mission core team completed by OHB-Sweden, QinetiQ Space and CASA Espacio. In this paper an overview of the PROBA-3 mission is provided, with a more detailed description of the formation flying preliminary design and results.