Ricerc@Sapienza

The possibility to reconfigure satellite formations with utilization of the drag and the solar radiation pressure has been established with previous works. Passive formation reconfiguration maneuvers may be achieved by controlling the attitude of the satellites and varying the area exposed to the perturbation forces. This paper deals with the development of a simple but effective model to understand the possibilities offered by this kind of maneuvers.

A novel approach for minimum-time reconfiguration of satellite formations is proposed considering the perturbation forces as control variables. Planning appropriate attitude maneuvers for each satellite, the atmospheric drag and of the solar radiation pressure are properly controlled, and the formation is given the appropriate inputs to achieve the imposed reconfiguration. Limits and advantages of the presented maneuvers are examined considering low Earth orbits, medium Earth orbits, and geostationary orbits.

The early stages of a space mission design are crucial for the development of the whole project because they strongly influence the ensuing design phases. Moreover, feasibility assessment at early stages brings to time and cost reductions and strongly determines the overall performances of proposed solutions. Concurrent Engineering (CE) is a systemic and systematic design strategy that employs real-time interdisciplinary activities for products development.

Radiation hardening for coping with cosmic-ray-induced faults in electronic equipment has always been a central topic of hardware/software development for aerospace missions. This work presents the design, verification and validation of an 8-bit space-rated RISC MCU FPGA soft-core, featuring hardware architecture and instruction set architecture full compliance with Microchip® PICmicro Midrange MCU.