TOWARDS SPACECRAFT DOCKING EMULATION USING HARDWARE-IN-THE-LOOP SIMULATION

Many demonstration missions such as Orbital Ex- press, DART, XSS-11, TECSAS, and the possible robotic servicing/decomissioning of Hubble have re- cently been planned. A common, important element to many of these missions is the necessity of me- chanically interfacing the spacecrafts involved. The Canadian Space Agency targets the utilization of a hardware-in-the-loop simulation (HLS) to emulate the satellite-docking procedure. This paper describes the spacecraft models implemented in the simulator, the orbital mechanics module, as well as the attitude and orbit control systems. The simulator can be used in one of the pure simulation or the HLS modes. In the former, a contact-dynamics model computes the forces and moments involved in the docking, whereas the actual docking hardware is used in the latter to obtain the contact forces and moments.