| Issue |
Volume 10, 2018
Progress in Flight Dynamics, Guidance, Navigation, and Control – Volume 10
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Page(s) | 217 - 238 | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/eucass/201810217 | |
| Published online | 08 June 2018 | |
ATV GNC flight performance and lessons learned
1
ESA-ESTEC Noordwijk, Netherlands
2
Airbus Defence and Space Les Mureaux, France
ESA’s fifth and final Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), Georges Lemaître, performed its fully automated rendezvous and docking with the International Space Station (ISS) on August 12, 2014. The ATV’s navigation sensors have shown their worth docking the 20-ton vehicles with aft port of the Space Station, manoeuvring into position and docking with an excellent accuracy. For the second consecutive time after ATV-4, the accuracy at docking was such that the ATV probe head was directly captured inside the Zvezda docking mechanism without contact with the receiving cone. From 30 km and down to a distance of 250 m, ATV uses GPS (Global Positioning System) information from its own receiver and the Station’s that is transmitted over a radiofrequency link. As it moves closer, ATV switches to laser navigation, using the reflection of laser pulses on reflectors mounted on the Space Station. This paper presents the achievements and performance of ATV GNC (Guidance, Navigation, and Control) across the 5 missions for both types of navigation. It will also discuss the observations made during the various flights regarding unforeseen conditions such as space environment or target pattern contamination having a potential impact on performance and how they were resolved.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).