The Autonomous Vision Approach Navigation and Target Identification (AVANTI) Experiment: Objectives and Design

Kurzfassung

This paper provides the description of the Autonomous Vision Approach Navigation and Target Identification (AVANTI) experiment currently in development at the German Space Operations Center. AVANTI is one of the secondary scientific experiments to be accomplished within the FireBird mission which will launch the BIROS spacecraft in 2015. AVANTI is intended to demonstrate vision-based noncooperative autonomous approach and recede maneuvering making use of angles-only measurements. To this aim BIROS plays the role of the active servicer satellite and performs some proximity operations with respect to a picosatellite, previously released in-orbit by BIROS through a deployment device. Measurements consist of the line-of-sight angles to the picosatellite gained from pictures taken by the star tracker mounted on BIROS. This paper addresses the experiment design to meet the system's requirements and provides a description of its main flight dynamics subsystems, including the key algorithms they are based on. A simulation of the first phases of the experiment is provided to explain the experiment concept and to show the expected performance.