The Synchronized Position Hold Engage Reorient Experimental Satellites (SPHERES) are an experimental testbed for guidance, navigation and control algorithms that has been operated, by astronauts, inside the crew volume of the International Space Station (ISS) since 2006. In October 2012, the MIT Space Systems Laboratory and Aurora Flight Sciences will launch a vision based navigation upgrade to...

The increasing number of satellites for specific space tasks makes it difficult traditional satellite task planning that relies on ground station and on-board execution to fully exploit the overall effectiveness satellites. Meanwhile, complex changeable environment in also poses challenges management multi-satellite systems (MSS). To address above issues, this paper formulates a mixed integer o...

Space robots play a significant role in on‐orbit servicing (OOS) missions, such as inspecting, capturing, refueling, and repairing satellites, assembling maintaining large space infrastructure, removing orbital debris. Over the past four decades, many robot engineering applications technology verifications for OOS have been accomplished. This article comprehensively reviews advances by represen...

The Air Force Satellite Control Network (AFSCN) coordinates communications to more than 100 satellites via nine ground stations positioned around the globe. Customers request an antenna at a ground station for a specific time window along with possible alternative slots. Typically, 500 requests per day result in more than 100 conflicts, which are requests that cannot be satisfied because other ...

The primary ground-based instruments used to report total column ozone (TOC) are Brewer and Dobson spectrophotometers in separate networks. These instruments make measurements of the UV irradiances, and through a well-defined process, a TOC value is produced. Inherent to the algorithm is the use of a laboratory-determined crosssection data set. We used five ozone cross-section data sets: three ...

Mobility management is required to ensure the session continuity for multiple IP-enabled devices onboard a satellite that hands off between ground stations. Network Mobility (NEMO) can efficiently manage the mobility of multiple IP-enabled devices that are connected as a mobile network. However, existing mobility management solutions for satellite networks are unable to route through intermedia...

NASA is interested in using commercial satellites to provide broadband communications support for the International Space Station and other space missions. We describe a large-scale simulation model that we plan to use for detailed performance studies of critical parameters such as QoS guarantees for specific services, traffic routing schemes, transport protocol support, dynamic bandwidth alloc...

This paper presents some results of a recent study that has evaluated data accuracy, efficiency, and costeffectiveness of this remote-sensing LIDAR technology as compared to the conventional aerial photogrammetry and ground total station methods for terrain data acquisition and mapping. An overview of airborne laser mapping technology for producing digital terrain models and digital databases f...

Earth observation satellites are used to observe the earth surfaces, sea surfaces, analysis of anthropogenic effects on earth, earth imaging, climatic monitoring, ocean currents etc. The observation instruments are installed on satellites for remote sensing purposes. Major imaging observing instruments includes Panchromatic CCD/TDI cameras, multispectral CCD/TDI cameras and SAR payloads. A Sate...