Autonomous Formation Flying in LEO - Seven months of routine formation flying with frequent reconfigurations

Kurzfassung

This paper presents flight results and lessons learned from the Autonomous Formation Flying (AFF) experimental and routine phase conducted by SSC. The paper will cover the design, flight results, operational aspects as well as lessons learned. Within PRISMA there is a number of different experimental guidance and control modules, AFF is one of them. However, AFF is the only module that after the experimental phase has been used on routine basis for an extended period of time. AFF has, as of the deadline for this article, accumulated over 4 months of closed loop cooperative satellite formation flying time. There were about 20 days for dedicated AFF experiments, while the rest has been operational routine formation flying, where AFF has been used in closed loop to support other open loop guidance and navigation experiments, maintaining and reconfiguring the formation between other experiments as well as over weekends and holidays. For this, over 110 different formation reconfigurations have been performed. The operational range has been from 30km down to 10m. As also the ground support for AFF is automated to a very large extend, the required effort for operators are minimal.