Advanced guidance and control technology for spacecraft automation

The paper considers three major areas where a potential for autonomous operation exists. The Feature Identification and Location Experiment (FILE), a NASA Shuttle experiment in the area of pointing, tracking, detection and acquisition, is discussed with consideration given to FILE block diagram and its characteristics. A number of rendezvous and docking systems are analysed noting that due to limited man interaction, fuel and trajectory optimization requirements, safety, communications limitations and a need for real-time operation, radar, laser and video rendezvous concepts have received serious consideration over past five years. The Planetary Landing Site Selection System which locates the smoothest area of the surface by finding the minimum ratio of the ac component of the video signal to the dc component is also discussed. Further autonomous navigation (AN) systems are evaluated with respect to interplanetary, earth observational, and earth orbital without observation requirements missions. The benefits of AN are reduction in mission support cost, increased mission flexibility and science data acquisition and reduction of the data management problem. It is concluded that automated operations in space provide the key to optimized mission design and data acquisition at minimum cost for the future.