Dottorato in ENERGIA E AMBIENTE

Titolo della tesi: Orbital Control, Configuration Acquisition and Collision avoidance in Spacecraft Formations

Spacecraft formation flying is currently an evolving field of research with promising and complex applications that were nevertheless previously impossible in solo spacecraft missions. A key challenge in formation flying dynamics is to design the optimal formation control architecture that can perform complex tasks. The primary difficulties include 1) the Need for the satellites in formation to work co-operatively for the entire duration of the mission. 2) Difficulty in modelling non-linearity and differential perturbations 3) Requirements of periodic reconfiguration and formation maintenance manoeuvres. 4) Additional computational requirements for both navigation and control. The focus of this thesis is the development and analysis of various control strategies and coordination algorithms for spacecraft formations with the goal of analysing and proposing solutions using various reconfiguration strategies. In addition to collision avoidance, additional reconfiguration issues like fuel Balancing and maintenance of overlap in coverage were identified and solutions are presented and evaluated.