Duration: 6 months
The ESA GNC, AOCS & Pointing Laboratory has developed a high-performance stabilization breadboard to validate and assess the pointing stability performances of similar future systems in the presence of micro-vibrations. Depending on the source of disturbances, pointing stability is improved by a factor 10 or more. This system is complementary to line-of-sight stabilisation systems in terms of disturbances type mitigation, accommodation, and principle: indeed, this system mitigates wheels and cryo-coolers micro-vibrations instead of solar array drive mechanisms disturbances, and it is set below a payload or below the source of disturbances instead of being set inside the payload. Besides it uses accelerometers and/or gyroscopes and shakers instead of image sensor and fast steering mirrors. It is also different from a hexapod which uses piezo sensors and actuators. This technology enables meeting challenging pointing stability performances of future Earth Observation of Science missions without cold gas systems even in the presence of cryo-coolers. Different type of controllers ‘algorithms have been designed (LTI, LPV, SISO, MIMO), tuned and tested by simulation and some of them have been validated on a given configuration of the breadboard, including system identification. The already tuned controllers are NOT adapted to any new breadboard configuration: a new bread-board configuration needs system identification and controllers re-tuning. The proposed research aims at completing the work already done by automating the full process including system identification on a new test set-up, controllers tuning, and validation followed by a complete validation test campaign comparing the various controllers’ performances. The objective of this activity is to check the ease of transfer of this technology to a new entity external to its development, and to check the adaptability of the process to a new breadboard configuration. This will increase the technology operational TRL
