Analysis of LIDAR-based relative navigation performance during close-range rendezvous toward an uncooperative spacecraft

The concepts of On-Orbit Servicing and Active Debris Removal have been introduced to increase the operating life of active satellites and as a debris remediation measure, respectively. For these operations, a servicing spacecraft (chaser) must orbit safely and autonomously in close proximity to a target that is typically known, but non-cooperative. So, advanced guidance, navigation and control functions are required to carry out these missions. This work focuses on the problem of estimating the target-chaser relative state and the target inertia properties exploiting measurements from a LIDAR during the different phases of a close-range rendezvous maneuver. Specifically, the relative trajectory is designed to provide both safety and optimal observation conditions. To this aim, it is composed of multiple safety ellipses for monitoring purposes, in which the target-chaser relative distance is of the order of tens of meters, followed by a R-bar trajectory for the final approach. In this scenario, the LIDAR-based relative navigation solution is a multi-step processing architecture, which exploits pose determination techniques, unscented Kalman filtering and a linear least squares solver. The performance of this approach is evaluated by means of numerical simulations.