GEOMETRIC SNAPSHOT METHOD FOR THE AUTONOMOUS RELATIVE POSITIONING OF FORMATION FLYING SATELLITES IN REAL-TIME

The autonomous relative positioning of formation flying satellites is of major importance for a safe operation of the satellite formation. To this end, several challenges are faced: a stringent position accuracy requirement, the real-time capability of the positioning algorithm and the deviation of the measured satellite distances between ranging sensors from the desired distance between the telescope reference points. In this work, these challenges are approached by developing two autonomous relative positioning algorithms. In the serial algorithm, the distance measurements are transferred to the telescope reference positions before an optimization problem including the transferred distance measurements is set up and solved. In the incorporated algorithm, the measurement transformation is integrated in the optimization problem besides the angular and attitude measurements that are also included. Both algorithms are applied to two different case studies and evaluated with respect to the stated challenges.