Mace Ii: a Space Shuttle Experiment for Investigating Adaptive Control of Flexible Spacecraft

This paper presents an overview of the Middeck Active Control Experiment Flight II (MACE II). MACE is a space shuttle flight experiment designed to investigate modeling and control issues for achieving high precision pointing and vibration control of future spacecraft. MACE was developed by NASA Langley Research Center, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Payload Systems, Inc. The experiment was successfully flown on STS-67 in March 1995. The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has initiated a program to refly the MACE hardware to investigate the use of adaptive control algorithms for precision structural control. MACE II will answer key questions about the ability of adaptive algorithms to perform with respect to the constraints and uncertainties associated with space flight. It will also provide a basis for comparing these adaptive techniques with the fixed-gain linear control approach