Formation Flying Guidance Navigation and Control Design for Science Missions

Abstract This paper presents the recent activities performed by Astrium to design Guidance Navigation Control systems for European Formation Flying missions: PROBA 3, SIMBOL-X, Darwin and Pegase. These missions cover a wide range of formation flying needs from medium accuracy mission (astronomy) up to high accuracy (interferometry). For each class of mission the paper gives an overview of the major system requirements, the trade-off for the GNC architecture definition, the proposed GNC design and the assessment of the performances.