Speaker
Mr
Daniel Serrano
(SENER)
Description
PROBA-3 is one of ESA’s technology demonstrators, which consists of two spacecraft flying in close formation in a highly elliptic orbit. Its aim is to create a Sun coronagraph instrument with the optical payload and the external occulter disc mounted on different spacecraft. One of its main challenges is to develop the GNC that maintains a flight-formation during the apogee arc with very stringent attitude and relative position requirements. The flight-formation consists of aligning both spacecraft with the Sun vector, while maintaining a fixed distance with sub-millimetre precision. In addition, various technology demonstration manoeuvres will be performed for virtual structure simulation (rotating the formation, while maintaining a fixed distance), and virtual telescope focusing (resizing the formation, while keeping the Sun vector aligned).
The control problem has been posed as a coupled 6DoF multi-input multi-output (MIMO) design task, which simultaneously takes care of both the attitude and the position. To meet the design specifications, state-of-the-art H_∞- and μ-synthesis techniques have been utilized to obtain a robust controller. In addition, in-house developed simulation tools have been employed for validation purposes in a non-linear environment.
In this paper the step-by-step design techniques and accompanying tools used by SENER are presented, starting with the formulation of the control problem, working towards the justification of the designed controller, and resulting in a fully validated product both in frequency and time domain for integration with the full PROBA-3 system.
| Applicant type | Co-author |
|---|
Primary authors
Dr
Joost Veenman
(SENER)
Mr
Raul Sanchez
(SENER)
Co-author
Mr
Daniel Serrano
(SENER)
