THE PRISMA IRIDES RENDEZVOUS EXPERIMENT

PRISMA was launched on June 15, 2010 to demonstrate strategies and technologies for formation flying and rendezvous. OHB Sweden is the prime contractor for the project which is funded by the Swedish National Space Board with additional support from DLR, CNES, and DTU. In April 2013, when both the nominal and extended mission phases were successfully completed, new objectives were assigned to the Mango spacecraft and the Tango spacecraft was shut down permanently. An eighteen month journey was started towards a new, non-cooperative space object to demonstrate rendezvous and inspection within an experiment called IRIDES (Iterative Reduction of Inspection Distance with Embedded Safety). Since the start of IRIDES, the Mango spacecraft has completed a series of optimized orbit maneuvers, involving semi-major, inclination and eccentricity changes that have put the spacecraft on a drift towards the new object. The rendezvous is expected in the second half of 2014 and will demonstrate optical relative navigation technologies and the characterization of the rendezvous object and its motion with the use of the on-board video system. The inspection strategy within IRIDES includes a series of inherently collision free drift maneuvers through the cross-track/radial plane of the rendezvous object, and a successively reduction of the closest relative distance.