CubeSail: A low cost CubeSat based solar sail demonstration mission

CubeSail is a nano-solar sail mission based on the 3U CubeSat standard, which is currently being designed and built at the Surrey Space Centre, University of Surrey. CubeSail will have a total mass of around 3 kg and will deploy a 5 × 5 m sail in low Earth orbit. The primary aim of the mission is to demonstrate the concept of solar sailing and end-of-life de-orbiting using the sail membrane as a drag-sail. The spacecraft will have a compact 3-axis stabilised attitude control system, which uses three magnetic torquers aligned with the spacecraft principle axis as well as a novel two-dimensional translation stage separating the spacecraft bus from the sail. CubeSail’s deployment mechanism consists of four novel booms and four-quadrant sail membranes. The proposed booms are made from tape-spring blades and will deploy the sail membrane from a 2U CubeSat standard structure. This paper presents a systems level overview of the CubeSat mission, focusing on the mission orbit and de-orbiting, in addition to the deployment, attitude control and the satellite bus.     

小推力航天器的地月低能转移轨道

 在限制性四体模型下研究基于小推力方式的地月低能转移问题,通过借助于平动点轨道的相空间结构来揭示小推力转移的机理。重点研究了小推力转移自由飞行段的构造：经由LL₁点穿越获得最小能量的低能转移;而经由LL₁点Halo轨道穿越,得到(M,N)圈穿越轨道;由于Halo轨道相对于平动点增加了一维度的选择,根据(2,2)圈穿越轨道构造该转移的自由飞行段。在地球势阱逃逸和月球势阱捕获段,分别设计了合适的小推力的控制律及发动机开/关机时间,成功实施近地球段的小推力加速和近月球段的减速。尽管未对所得到的结果进行优化,所得转移轨道的燃料消耗也与类似边界条件的SMART-1轨道基本一致。     

Piloted operations at a near-Earth object (NEO)

In late 2006, NASA's Constellation Program sponsored a study to examine the feasibility of sending a piloted Orion spacecraft to a near-Earth object. NEOs are asteroids or comets that have perihelion distances less than or equal to 1.3 astronomical units, and can have orbits that cross that of the Earth. Therefore, the most suitable targets for the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) are those NEOs in heliocentric orbits similar to Earth's (i.e. low inclination and low eccentricity). One of the significant advantages of this type of mission is that it strengthens and validates the foundational infrastructure of the United States Space Exploration Policy and is highly complementary to NASA's planned lunar sortie and outpost missions circa 2020. A human expedition to a NEO would not only underline the broad utility of the Orion CEV and Ares launch systems, but would also be the first human expedition to an interplanetary body beyond the Earth–Moon system. These deep space operations will present unique challenges not present in lunar missions for the onboard crew, spacecraft systems, and mission control team. Executing several piloted NEO missions will enable NASA to gain crucial deep space operational experience, which will be necessary prerequisites for the eventual human missions to Mars.Our NEO team will present and discuss the following:

• new mission trajectories and concepts;

• operational command and control considerations;

• expected science, operational, resource utilization, and impact mitigation returns; and

• continued exploration momentum and future Mars exploration benefits.

The effect of neglecting VLBI reference station clock offsets on UT1 estimates

Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) allows to monitor universal time (UT1) by conducting regular international experiments. Such dedicated observation networks are equipped with different hardware components, which require different processing strategies when the data are correlated. As the timing units at each stations are usually offset with respect to universal time (UTC) this effect should be considered during correlation processing. Thus, it is investigated how neglecting of these offsets theoretically impacts the estimation of UT1. Three different strategies for the proper handling of the timing offset will be discussed and their advantages/drawbacks will be pointed out. Moreover, it is studied how neglecting of these timing offsets affects UT1 time-series and how such a missing correction can be applied a posteriori. Although the discussed effect is for most of the UT1 experiments smaller than the formal error of the estimates, it is important to consider station clock offsets properly in next-generation VLBI systems, which are expected to improve accuracy of results by about one order of magnitude.     

Sumbandilasat—An operational technology demonstrator

Technology advances in sensor, digital technology and a standardised modular satellite bus are enabling a new generation of 80 kg micro-satellites with a better than 6.5 m GSD multi-spectral performance, to be specified, built and deployed with a dedicated launch within 12 months. The result of the standardised modular bus is lower cost, higher reliability and fast deployment. Operational remote sensing with a micro-satellite is thus within reach of individual organisations for dedicated missions. Sumbandilasat (pioneer in the Venda language) is a second generation satellite technology building on the expertise obtained in the Sunsat small satellite programme. The components used to build Sumbandilasat are the result of a technology development program of more than 3 years. Sumbandilasat is an operational technology demonstrator with more than 90% newly developed or improved subsystems and a compact refractive imager as a precursor to the MSMISat satellite with the same multi-spectral band set. The scalable, standardised modular satellite bus architecture enables satellites with a mass of 80–450 kg to be adapted to the specific mission requirements with minimum new engineering effort.     

基于圆球与椭球的地球敏感器地心矢量算法分析

红外成像敏感器代表了新一代敏感器的发展方向。本文介绍了红外成像敏感器光学系统工作原理,对红外成像敏感器光学系统进行简化,利用小孔模型完成了对敏感器光学系统的建模,分别在地球球形模型和旋转椭球模型下进行了地心矢量推导和计算,获得了焦平面内地平圆盘的相关参数的具体表达式,用牛顿迭代法对地心距进行数值计算,比较分析了球形模型与椭球模型在求解地心距精度上的差别,分析了敏感器测量误差对地心矢量精度的影响,以及焦平面内地平圆盘各参数分别对地心距计算精度的影响程度。     

Application of CCD drift-scan photoelectric technique on monitoring GEO satellites

Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO) satellites are widely used because of their unique characteristics of high-orbit and remaining permanently in the same area of the sky. Precise monitoring of GEO satellites can provide a key reference for the judgment of satellite operation status, the capture and identification of targets, and the analysis of collision warning. The observation using ground-based optical telescopes plays an important role in the field of monitoring GEO targets. Different from distant celestial bodies, there is a relative movement between the GEO target and the background reference stars, which makes the conventional observation method limited for long focal length telescopes. CCD drift-scan photoelectric technique is applied on monitoring GEO targets. In the case of parking the telescope, the good round images of the background reference stars and the GEO target at the same sky region can be obtained through the alternating observation of CCD drift-scan mode and CCD stare mode, so as to improve the precision of celestial positioning for the GEO target. Observation experiments of GEO targets were carried out with 1.56-meter telescope of Shanghai Astronomical Observatory. The results show that the application of CCD drift-scan photoelectric technique makes the precision of observing the GEO target reach the level of 0.2″, which gives full play to the advantage of the long focal length of the telescope. The effect of orbit improvement based on multi-pass of observations is obvious and the prediction precision of extrapolating to 72-h is in the order of several arc seconds in azimuth and elevation.     

Air-LUSI: A robotic telescope design for lunar spectral measurements

This paper presents the mechanical design of a new robotic telescope that was designed and built to acquire lunar spectral measurements from the science pod of NASA's ER-2 aircraft while flying at an altitude of 70,000 feet (21.34 km). The robotic telescope used a double gimbal design that allowed for target tracking in azimuth and elevation. In addition to the challenging and restrictive geometry of the science pod, each component needed to be carefully selected to ensure that they could withstand the operating conditions at high altitude such as harsh temperatures extending as low as −54 °C and atmospheric pressure less than 1.05 psi (7.23 kPa). Due to the cold temperatures, low atmospheric pressure and the likely exposure to moisture, high strength industrial linear actuators were used to create an adjustable linkage system that controlled the pointing and tracking of the telescope. Although unconventional, this allowed for a robust design that outperformed the team's expectations by tracking the Moon for 40 min with an average tracking error under 0.05°. The results presented within this paper were acquired during a first set of engineering test flights, with further scientific missions to follow.     

Finite-time composite guidance law with input constraint and dynamics compensation

Guidance laws are proposed for a near space interceptor with on–off type thrust as output. The target-interceptor engagement kinematics is integrated with the first-order dynamics of thruster to design guidance laws. The bang-bang type guidance law with linear sliding mode is proposed to deal with thruster dynamics, and the sufficient condition for finite time convergence is rigorously proved based on the finite-time convergence theory. According to the sufficient condition, a sliding mode guidance law with hysteresis-band switching is introduced to reduce the switching frequency of thruster. Then two guidance laws are combined into a composite guidance law to improve the guidance performance. Simulation results show that the line-of-sight angular rate can converge to a neighborhood of the equilibrium point before the final time of the guidance process, and the composite guidance law has better performance than typical guidance laws.     

Simulation study of motion of charged particles trapped in Earth’s magnetosphere

This article aims to understand the motion of the charged particles trapped in the Earth’s inner magnetosphere. The emphasis is on identifying the numerical scheme, which is appropriate to characterize the trajectories of the charged particles of different energies that enter the Earth’s magnetosphere and get trap along the magnetic field lines. These particles perform three different periodic motions, namely: gyration, bounce, and azimuthal drift. However, often, the gyration of the particle is ignored, and only the guiding center of the particle is traced to reduce the computational time. It is because the simulation of all three motions (gyro, bounce, and drift) together needed a robust numerical scheme, which has less numerical dissipation. We have developed a three-dimensional test particle simulation model in which the relativistic equation of motion is solved numerically using the fourth and sixth-order Runge-Kutta methods. The stability of the simulation model is verified by checking the conservation of total kinetic energy and adiabatic invariants linked with each type of motion. We found that the sixth-order Runge-Kutta method is suitable to trace the complete trajectories of both proton and electron of a wide energy range, 5 keV to 250 MeV for L = 2 – 6. We have estimated the bounce and drift periods from the simulations, and they are found to be in good agreement with the theory. The study implies that a simulation model with sixth-order Runge-Kutta method can be applied to the time-vary, non-analytical form of magnetic configuration in future studies to understand the dynamics of charged particles trapped in Earth’s magnetosphere.