Assessment of a Supervisory Fault-Hiding Scheme in a Classical Guidance, Navigation and Control Setup: the e.Deorbit mission

The design of a model-based Fault Tolerant Control (FTC) strategy based on Virtual Actuators (VA) in a built-in Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC) setup is addressed for the e.Deorbit space mission. This mission, initiated by the European Space Agency (ESA), aims at removing a large defunct satellite from Earth orbit: ENVISAT. The goal of this paper is to promote academic solutions to add fault tolerance capacities against thruster faults without any change or new tuning of the already in-place GNC solution. The validation of the proposed FTC solution is assessed by a simulation campaign based on a high-fidelity nonlinear industrial simulator.