meetings - Space Flight Mechanics Committee

This study focuses on the capability of an inspector spacecraft to determine the orbit and
ballistic coefficient of a resident space object using an onboard passive stereo vision-based
relative navigation sensor. The inspector spacecraft absolute position (from GPS) is used in
addition to the vision-based sensor data by onboard filters to estimate the RSO orbit. An
LQG controller enables the inspector to continuously track the object by using stereo
images from the sensor. The accuracy degradation in the orbit determination process due to
the vision sensor measurement errors are analyzed using consider covariance analsyis.
10:45 AAS Optimal Impulsive Collision Avoidance
13-436 Claudio Bombardelli, Technical University of Madrid (UPM)
Closed-form analytical expressions are provided to accurately estimate the minimum
distance between two orbiting bodies following a generic impulsive collision avoidance
maneuver. The expressions, which are valid for generic elliptical orbits, are validated with a
full numerical model and employed to derive optimal maneuver direction and orbit location
in order to maximize the close approach distance between the colliding bodies. While long
warning time maneuvers appear to be optimal when the impulse is virtually tangent to the
orbit the case of short warning time presents less intuitive results.
23 rd AAS / AIAA Space Flight Mechanics Meeting Page 93