A Deploying Process Analysis Using Sub-Pixel Cross-Correlation Method. An Application for Deploying Experiment of Small-Scaled Model of ETS-VIII Deployable Antenna.

To establish a large deployable antenna, monitoring and collimation are essentially important for reliable and precise deployment. We have developed an analysis method to detect shifts in several images, in which the combination of cross-correlations between images and approximation at sub-pixel precision enables us to detect shifts in images with a precision of up to 0.01 pixels. The LDREX mission, which was a preliminary experiment for the large deployable antenna of ETS-VIII, was performed in December 2001. During this experiment, anomalies occurred in the deployable antenna, and deployment was aborted. To understand the cause of the anomalies, we used our visual analysis method. Using this analysis, we detected vibrating features of the deployable antenna, which were useful for explaining the anomalies. In this paper, we outline our visual analysis method and discuss its application to monitoring of the deployable antenna.