DESIGN OF DOCKING MECHANISM FOR SMALL SPACECRAFT

Docking mechanisms have been employed in space missions for more than 50 years. In fact, since the Apollo program, docking ports became unavoidable subsystems to connect different spacecraft together. With the start of the Space Stations era, the new concept of standardization was born and the contribution of different participants from various countries led to the definition of common design requirements. However, this standardization progress involved only large space structures and manned missions: in the field of small commercial and scientific automatic spacecraft there is still a lack on research and development of docking technologies. At the same time, the design and exploitation of small satellites can open new ways to carry out space activities. Large structures such as segmented mirrors telescopes or solar arrays can be realized through the mechanical connection of many small satellites. Deep-space multi-probe automatic exploration programs could also take benefit from the employment of docking systems to extend and reconfigure their mission profiles. In this framework this paper presents a new concept of docking system for small satellites. The proposed solution has axis-symmetric interfaces with a “probe and drogue" logic; to perform docking and undocking maneuvers it respectively demands for a well defined chaser approach velocity to activate the passive latches and propulsion abilities to perform separation. In this way the implementation of active locking mechanisms is avoided. The mechanism design and preliminary validation through numerical simulations is presented: 3-D modeling, kinematic and dynamic analysis guided the development of the interfaces geometry.