PACMAN EXPERIMENT: A PARABOLIC FLIGHT CAMPAIGN STUDENT EXPERIENCE

Presently, no competitive or commercial solution is available to perform autonomous rendezvous and docking between small-satellites. Therefore, in the last years there has been an increasing interest in developing different technologies, addressing the main issues of fuel consumption and the strong impact of close range navigation subsystems on satellites mass budget and complexity. One promising solution is represented by relative magnetic navigation, where the chaser relative position and attitude can be controlled thanks to magnetic interactions with the target vehicle. PACMAN experiment is a technology demonstrator that has been developed by a team of university and PhDs students in the framework of ESA Education Fly Your Thesis! 2017 programme and supported by the University of Padova. The experiment has been selected to fly during the 68th ESA Parabolic Flight Campaign, that took place last December 2017. The main goal of the project is to develop and validate in low-gravity conditions an integrated system for proximity navigation and soft-docking based on magnetic interactions, suitable for small-scale spacecrafts. This will be accomplished by launching a miniature spacecraft mock-up towards a free-floating target that generates a static magnetic field; a set of actively-controlled magnetic coils on-board the spacecraft mock-up, assisted by dedicated localization sensors, will be used to control its attitude and position relative to the target. The realization of PACMAN experiment will also allow to validate the theoretical/numerical models that describe such interactions. This paper presents an overview of the experiment concept and design. Particular attention will be given to the problem solving.