New tools for formation monitoring and maintenance

Effective control of formations of spacecraft requires new tools that model all aspects of the formation across the mission lifetime. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has been promoting the development of such tools. The culmination of these efforts is the FreeFlyer and AutoCon systems that provide frameworks for the incorporation of formation approaches into both ground based and autonomous control of satellite formations. This paper describes how these systems have been used to model formations for Auroral Lites, Auroral Multiscale Midex, and Earth Orbiter-1.