Lab Activities to Simulate In-Orbit Proximity Manoeuvres

Ground tests play a key role in verifying many crit ical aspects of a spacecraft mission, even within the current trend of high fidelity simulatio n tools. In fact numerical runs of complex manoeuvres still need some realistic indications of the expected system’s behaviour to better define model assumptions. To this aim different test-beds have been recently built at the Guidance and Navigation Laboratory of Sapienza - Università di Roma. They s hare, for reasons of costs and complexity, the limitation of a bi-dimensional repr esentation of the space gravity-less environment. Nevertheless, they allowed to better i nvestigate complex dynamics’ phenomena typical to space activities, and a number of intere sting indications have been provided by these experimental tests. Among the different reali zations there are robotic arms equipped with different end-effectors, a self-standing float ing platform

Ground tests play a key role in verifying many crit ical aspects of a spacecraft mission, even within the current trend of high fidelity simulatio n tools. In fact numerical runs of complex manoeuvres still need some realistic indications of the expected system’s behaviour to better define model assumptions. To this aim different test-beds have been recently built at the Guidance and Navigation Laboratory of Sapienza - Università di Roma. They s hare, for reasons of costs and complexity, the limitation of a bi-dimensional repr esentation of the space gravity-less environment. Nevertheless, they allowed to better i nvestigate complex dynamics’ phenomena typical to space activities, and a number of intere sting indications have been provided by these experimental tests. Among the different reali zations there are robotic arms equipped with different end-effectors, a self-standing float ing platform representing a spacecraft bus (also able to perform rendezvous or re-orientation manoeuvres) and a scaled simulator for image-based navigated and controlled formation-flyi ng. The paper is intended to present the main characteristics of these test-beds and to disc uss their performance and the related research activities.