By Simone D'Amico Oct 25, 2021
I am humbled and honored that we just received the 2021 AIAA Small Satellite Best Paper Award from the AIAA SciTech 2021 Forum for the technical paper: “Adam Koenig, Simone D'Amico, Lightsey Glenn; Formation Flying Orbit and Control Concept for the VISORS Mission; AIAA-2021-0423.”
The VIrtual Super Optics Reconfigurable Swarm (VISORS) mission is a distributedsystems telescope consisting of two 6U cubesats separated by forty meters during science observations that will obtain high-resolution images of active solar regions in the extreme ultraviolet spectrum. This mission is extremely challenging because the CubeSats must autonomously control their relative motion with unprecedented cm-level accuracy while operating in close proximity while ensuring passive safety. This paper presents a number of new Astrodynamics spacecraftcontrol gnc contributions that enable the VISORS mission to meet its challenging requirements and more in general demonstrate the feasibility of precise formation control of CubeSats in low Earth orbit.
Congratulations to the VISORS team and NSF on enabling new spacetechnology and an award winning paper!
Simone D'Amico is the founder and director of SLAB
