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Meeting	ACGS Committee Meeting 117 - Napa, CA - March 2016
Agenda Location	5 SUBCOMMITTEE B – MISSILES AND SPACE 5.2 Passively Safe Satellite Cluster Design
Title	Passively Safe Satellite Cluster Design
Presenter	Michael Messina
Affiliation	Northrop Grumman
Available Downloads*	presentation
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Abstract	This presentation describes the design of passively safe spacecraft clusters. The key design considerations are briefly described and then our approach to the guidance, navigation, and control aspects are described. The guidance aspects discussed include the choice of cluster formations, basic cluster maintenance operations, and a relative cluster guidance command generation method that ignores common disturbances. For navigation, a carrier-phase differential GPS approach for precise relative navigation is described. Finally, two controllers are presented: a reference following receding horizon controller (RF-RHC) and a Natural Motion Controller (NMC). The RF-RHC’s goal is to keep the cluster in a desired formation while the NMC’s goal is to keep all the cluster members in proximity without a specified formation. Both of these controllers incorporate passive safety directly into a RHC problem formulation, ensuring that every control burn executed by every satellite guarantees passive safety with respect to the rest of the cluster.