Session
Technical Session VIII: University Student Scholarship Competition
Abstract
Increasing interest in small spacecraft has fostered a variety of new mission concepts. Within this busy framework, one particular family of mission concepts is taking shape - spacecraft formations. Formation flying entails the organized collection of satellites in a region of space to do a certain job. Missions of this kind pose some interesting design challenges. Most notably, active control of a formation is a fairly popular topic. The aim of s.uch research is to devise a means of stabilizing a loosely bound system while conserving valuable resources. Another area, which seems to be lagging in attention, is the area of formation assembly. Formation assembly involves getting the vehicles to some rendezvous point prior to actually constructing the formation. Equal care should be taken with system resources at this stage. In this paper, a brief overview of these formation flying concepts will be given. The discussion will then focus on analyzing a hypothesized formation assembly strategy. The emphasis will be on using precious resources such as time and fuel as a performance metric for the strategy under various conditions. The derived relations will provide insight about what one might expect to achieve operationally when attempting to assemble a group of satellites.
Operations Planning and Formation Flying: Analyzing Resource Usage in Formation Assembly
Increasing interest in small spacecraft has fostered a variety of new mission concepts. Within this busy framework, one particular family of mission concepts is taking shape - spacecraft formations. Formation flying entails the organized collection of satellites in a region of space to do a certain job. Missions of this kind pose some interesting design challenges. Most notably, active control of a formation is a fairly popular topic. The aim of s.uch research is to devise a means of stabilizing a loosely bound system while conserving valuable resources. Another area, which seems to be lagging in attention, is the area of formation assembly. Formation assembly involves getting the vehicles to some rendezvous point prior to actually constructing the formation. Equal care should be taken with system resources at this stage. In this paper, a brief overview of these formation flying concepts will be given. The discussion will then focus on analyzing a hypothesized formation assembly strategy. The emphasis will be on using precious resources such as time and fuel as a performance metric for the strategy under various conditions. The derived relations will provide insight about what one might expect to achieve operationally when attempting to assemble a group of satellites.
