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Flight-Data Results of Estimate Fusion for Spacecraft Rendezvous Navigation from Shuttle Mission STS-69

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Abstract

A recently developed rendezvous navigation fusion filter that optimally exploits existing distributed filters for rendezvous and GPS navigation to achieve the relative and inertial state accuracies of both in a global solution is utilized here to process actual flight data. Space Shuttle Mission STS-69 was the first mission that gathered data from both rendezvous and Global Positioning System filters, allowing, for the first time, a test of the fusion algorithm with real flight data. Furthermore, a precise best estimate of the trajectory is available for portions of STS-69, making possible a check on the performance of the fusion filter. In order to successfully carry out this experiment with flight data, two extensions to the scheme were necessary: a fusion edit test based on differences between the filter state vectors, and an underweighting scheme to accommodate the suboptimal perfect target assumption made by the Shuttle rendezvous filter. With these innovations, the flight data was sucessfully fused from playbacks of downlinked and/or recorded measurement data through ground analysis versions of the Shuttle rendezvous filter and a GPS filter developed for another experiment. The fusion results agree with the best estimate of trajectory at approximately the levels of uncertainty expected from the fusion filter’s covariance matrix.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Aerospace Engineer, Aeroscience and Flight Mechanics Division, NASA Johnson Space Center, TX, 77058, Houston, USA

    J. Russell Carpenter

  2. Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, The University of Texas at Austin, TX, 78712, Austin, USA

    Robert H. Bishop (Associate Professor)

Authors
  1. J. Russell Carpenter
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  2. Robert H. Bishop
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Additional information

Significant portions of this paper appeared as Paper No. AAS 96-181 at the 1996 AAS/AIAA Spaceflight Mechanics Meeting, Austin, Texas, February 1996

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Carpenter, J.R., Bishop, R.H. Flight-Data Results of Estimate Fusion for Spacecraft Rendezvous Navigation from Shuttle Mission STS-69. J of Astronaut Sci 45, 297–319 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03546406

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03546406

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