Speaker
Description
With easier access to space and the arrival of new players, the number of satellites is increasing sharply. From the 2000s to the 2020s, the annual number of objects launched into space rose from a hundred per year to more than a thousand. In the same time, the risk of collision between active satellites and inactive objects and space debris has become more tangible and is monitored daily. Awareness of the need for a sustainable Space and economic interests are behind the emergence of In-Orbit Servicing. Thus, services such as satellite life extension, refuelling, upgrade or repair are expected to grow in the coming years. This trend will likely benefit from sensors and actuators that will not be a burden, either physically or economically, to the servicer vehicles. As low mass, low power and affordable sensors, cameras appear to be the sensor of choice for a growing number of future servicers needing to perform rendezvous and proximity operations in space.
With this in mind Sodern is developing AURICAM and HiCAM visible cameras to serve the purpose of reliable navigation and rendezvous solutions. Both cameras withstand radiations from LEO to GEO.
HiCAM is a small-medium field of view camera benefiting from high TRL subassemblies coming from HYDRA star tracker flight proven since 2012, and the Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) being developed for ESA Mars Sample Return (MSR) Earth Return Orbiter (ERO) mission. HiCam is expected to effectively support far range rendezvous operations.
AURICAM is a compact high-resolution camera derived from the AURIGA star tracker that was developed for the OneWeb constellation. Available with a medium or wide field of view, AURICAM is expected to be well suited for at least medium to close range rendezvous and proximity operations.
It will be shown how we believe these cameras can fit into a vision-based rendezvous system and support with some overlap the different phases of a typical rendezvous. To illustrate part of this, the example of a demonstration of ARAMIS vision-based rendezvous solution during a final approach simulated on a robotic test bench with a camera representative of AURICAM will be presented.
