Aerospace
Epoxy Test Bed
Georgia Institute of Technology
Project
Precision Epoxy Products
a division of :
Rock Art, Ltd.
4279 Midway Drive
Douglasville, Georgia 30134
Phone : (770) 489-0340
Georgia Tech ARD Test Bed
Facility
The following is an article
from the Spring 2007 Issue of AE News
(News from the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering)
Award won to build
Autonomous Rendezvous and Docking Test Bed Facility
Autonomous rendezvous
and
docking (ARD) operations are growing increasingly important in space operations
and will continue to do so in the future, both for civilian and military
missions. NASA, for instance, has recently identified ARD, servicing and
proximity operation in general, as crucial technologies for upcoming space
activities in low Earth orbit, as well as for planned manned missions to the
Moon, Mars and beyond. Similarly, the U.S. Air Force has identified space
operations as one of the most crucial factors for maintaining the current
superiority of the United States Armed Forces on the battlefield. ARD technology
will enable the continuous upgrading and servicing of satellites in orbit,
protecting and inspecting friendly military space assets and realizing novel
modular spacecraft architectures which may involve several spacecraft in an
interacting array.
A preliminary illustration of the
spacecraft
platform for Georgia Tech's new autonomous
rendezvous and docking test bed facility.
Although rendezvous and docking
technology has been developed and used since the 1950's in both American and
Russian space programs, the two programs have followed distinctly different
philosophies. The Russians generally have followed automated or semi-automated
rendezvous, with the Americans preferring human-executed and
astronaut-supervised rendezvous. To close this gap, the renewed interest is thus
specifically on autonomous (that is, routine, without human interference)
rendezvous and docking operations.
The main obstacle hindering progress in
this area has been the difficulty of testing any new rendezvous and docking
ideas in a realistic environment. Simulating weightlessness on earth is not an
easy proposition. Panagiotis Tsiotras, a professor in the School of Aerospace
Engineering, recently received an award from the U.S. Air Force Office for
Scientific Research (AFOSR) via the Defense University Research Instrumentation
Program (DURIP) to construct such a test facility at Georgia Tech. The new test
ARD facility will be located in Room 111 of the Montgomery Knight Building on
campus and will include a five-degree-of-freedom spacecraft platform
free-floating on a 12 x 14 foot flat epoxy floor. The specifications for the
floor are very tight: It should be flat within 0.001 inches and horizontal within a few milliradians.
Epoxy Test Bed installed at the Georgia Tech
ARD Facility by Rock Art in September, 2007
The spacecraft platform will float on a
very thin film of air (about 70 to 80 microns), and it will be equipped with a
large collection of sensors and actuators: rate gyros, gas thrusters, reaction
wheels, control moment gyros, a magnetometer, a Sun sensor and charge-coupled
device (CCD) cameras. The ability to choose from this diverse collection of
sensors and actuators will allow great flexibility in performing realistic
experiments under a variety of conditions as encountered by a specific
application. This new facility will be unique among United States academic
institutions, and it will enable unprecedented, realistic testing of new
rendezvous and docking control algorithms and hardware.
Developing innovative space
technology for space operations in orbit is a priority in American Space Programs
Visit the following Georgia Tech web-site for more
information:
www.ae.gatech.edu/labs/dcsl/research-9.html
Cho, D., Jung, D. and Tsiotras, P., "A
5-dof Experimental Platform for Spacecraft Rendezvous and Docking,'' Infotech
at Aerospace Conference, Seattle, WA, April 6-9, 2009, AIAA Paper 2009-1869
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