Autonomous Orbit Control with on-board collision risk management

Abstract: Many satellites have an orbit of reference defined according to their mission. The satellites need therefore to navigate as close as possible to their reference orbit. However, due to external forces, the trajectory of a satellite is disturbed and actions need to be taken. For now, the trajectories of the satellites are monitored by the operations of satellites department which gives appropriate instructions of navigation to the satellites. These steps require a certain amount of time and involvement which could be used for other purposes. A solution could be to make the satellites autonomous. The satellites would take their own decisions depending on their trajectory. The navigation control would be therefore much more efficient, precise and quicker. Besides, the autonomous orbit control could be coupled with an avoidance collision risk management. The satellites would decide themselves if an avoidance maneuver needs to be considered. The alerts of collisions would be given by the ground segment. In order to advance in this progress, this internship enables to analyse the feasibility of the implementation of the two concepts by testing them on an experiments satellite. To do so, tests plans were defined, tests procedures were executed and post-treatment tools were developed for analysing the results of the tests. Critical computational cases were considered as well. The tests were executed in real operations conditions.