Autonomous Recommendation of Fault Detection Algorithms for Spacecraft

Dear Editor, This letter deals with the problem of algorithm recommendation for online fault detection of spacecraft. By transforming the time series data into distributions and introducing a distribution-aware measure, a principal method is designed for quantifying the detectabilities of fault detection algorithms over special datasets.

Study on Characteristics of a High-Precision Cold Gas Micro Thruster

In order to improve the reliability of the spacecraft micro cold gas propulsion system and realize the precise control of the spacecraft attitude and orbit, a micro-thrust, high-precision cold gas thruster is carried out, at the same time due to the design requirements of the spacecraft, this micro-thrust should be continuous working more than 60 minutes, the traditional solenoid valve used for the thrusts can’t complete the mission, so a long-life micro latching valve is developed as the control valve for this micro thruster, because the micro latching valve can keep its position when it cuts off the outage. Firstly, the authors introduced the design scheme and idea of the thruster. Secondly, the performance of the latching valve and the flow characteristics of the nozzle were simulated. Finally, from the experimental results and compared with the numerical study, it shows that the long-life micro cold gas thruster developed in this paper meets the mission requirements.

Output Feedback Based Admissible Control of Switched Linear Singular Systems

The admissibility analysis and robust admissible control problem of the uncertain discrete-time switched linear singular (SLS) systems for arbitrary switching laws are investigated. Based on linear matrix inequalities, some sufficient conditions are given for: A) the existence of generalized common Lyapunov solution and the admissibility of the SLS systems for arbitrary switching laws, B) the existence of static output feedback control laws ensuring the admissibility of the closed-loop SLS systems for arbitrary switching laws and norm-bounded uncertainties.

Robust Control Based on Feedback Linearization for Roll Stabilizing of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Under Wave Disturbances

In the case of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle(AUV) navigating with low speed near water surface,a new method for design of roll motion controller is proposed in order to restrain wave disturbance effectively and improve roll stabilizing performance.Robust control is applied,which is based on uncertain nonlinear horizontal motion model of AUV and the principle of zero speed fin stabilizer.Feedback linearization approach is used to transform the complex nonlinear system into a comparatively simple linear system.For parameter uncertainty of motion model,the controller is designed with mixed-sensitivity method based on H-infinity robust control theory.Simulation results show better robustness improved by this control method for roll stabilizing of AUV navigating near water surface.

Application of Ultrasonic Motor to Control of Moment Gyroscope Gimbal Servo System

Attitude control system is one of the most important subsystems in a spacecraft.As a key actuator,the control moment gyroscope(CMG)mainly determines the performance of attitude control system.Whereas,the control accuracy and output torque smoothness of the CMG depends more on its gimbal servo system.Considering the constraints of size,mass and power consumption for a small satellite,here,a mini-CMG is designed,in which the gimbal servo system is driven by an ultrasonic motor.The good performances of the CMG are obtained by both the ultrasonic motor and the rotary inductosyn.The direct drive of gimbal improves its dynamic performance,with the output bandwidth above 20 Hz.The angular and speed closed-loop control obtains the 0.02°/s gimbal rate,and the output torque resolution better than 2×10^(-3) N·m.The ultrasonic motor provides 1.0N·m self-lock torque during power-off,with 12arc-second position accuracy.

Design of the solar X-ray detector for the Macao Science Satellite-1B

The solar X-ray detector(SXD)onboard the Macao Science Satellite-1B was designed to monitor solar flare bursts and to study the solar activity in the 25th solar cycle.The SXD includes two parts:a soft X-ray detection unit and a hard X-ray detection unit.Both the soft X-ray detection unit and the hard X-ray detection unit include two collimators,two X-ray detectors(a silicon drift detector and a cadmium-zinc-telluride detector),and a processing circuit.Compared with similar instruments,the energy range of the SXD is wider(1–600 ke V)and the energy resolution is better(150 e V at 5.9 ke V,12%at 59.5 ke V,and 3%at 662 keV).

Active Compliance Control of a Position‑Controlled Industrial Robot for Simulating Space Operations

An industrial robot with a six-axis force/torque sensor is usually used to produce a zero-gravity environment for testing space robotic operations.However,using traditional force control methods,such as admittance control,causes position-controlled industrial robots to undergo from force divergence owing to intrinsic time delay.In this paper,a new force control method is proposed to eliminate the force divergence.A hardware-in-the-loop(HIL)simulator with an industrial robot is first presented.The free-floating satellite dynamics and the motion mapping from the satellites to simulator are both established.Thus,the effects of measurement delay and dynamic response delay on contact velocity and force are investigated.After that,a real-time estimation method for contact stiffness and damping is proposed based on the adaptive Kalman filter.The measurement delay is compensated by a phase lead model.Moreover,the identified contact parameters are adopted to modify contact forces,and thus the dynamics response delay can be compensated for.Finally,a co-simulation and experiments were conducted to verify the force control method.The results show that contact stiffness and damping could be identified exactly and that the simulation divergence could be prevented.This paper proposes an active compliance control method that can deal with force constrained tasks of a position-controlled robot in unknown environments.

Research Progress on the Solder Joint Reliability of Electronics Using in Deep Space Exploration

The spacecraft for deep space exploration missions will face extreme environments,including cryogenic temperature,intense radiation,wide-range temperature variations and even the combination of conditions mentioned above.Harsh environments will lead to solder joints degradation or even failure,resulting in damage to onboard electronics.The research activities on high reliability solder joints using in extreme environments can not only reduce the use of onboard protection devices,but effectively improve the overall reliability of spacecraft,which is of great significance to the aviation industry.In this paper,we review the reliability research on SnPb solder alloys,Sn-based lead-free solder alloys and In-based solder alloys in extreme environments,and try to provide some suggestions for the follow-up studies,which focus on solder joint reliability under extreme environments.

Constrained Moving Path Following Control for UAV With Robust Control Barrier Function

This paper studies the moving path following(MPF)problem for fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)under output constraints and wind disturbances.The vehicle is required to converge to a reference path moving with respect to the inertial frame,while the path following error is not expected to violate the predefined boundaries.Differently from existing moving path following guidance laws,the proposed method removes complex geometric transformation by formulating the moving path following problem into a second-order time-varying control problem.A nominal moving path following guidance law is designed with disturbances and their derivatives estimated by high-order disturbance observers.To guarantee that the path following error will not exceed the prescribed bounds,a robust control barrier function is developed and incorporated into controller design with quadratic program based framework.The proposed method does not require the initial position of the UAV to be within predefined boundaries.And the safety margin concept makes error-constraint be respected even if in a noisy environment.The proposed guidance law is validated through numerical simulations of shipboard landing and hardware-in-theloop(HIL)experiments.

Analyzing the Effect of the Intra-Pixel Position of Small PSFs for Optimizing the PL of Optical Subpixel Localization

Subpixel localization techniques for estimating the positions of point-like images captured by pixelated image sensors have been widely used in diverse optical measurement fields.With unavoidable imaging noise,there is a precision limit(PL)when estimating the target positions on image sensors,which depends on the detected photon count,noise,point spread function(PSF)radius,and PSF’s intra-pixel position.Previous studies have clearly reported the effects of the first three parameters on the PL but have neglected the intra-pixel position information.Here,we develop a localization PL analysis framework for revealing the effect of the intra-pixel position of small PSFs.To accurately estimate the PL in practical applications,we provide effective PSF(e PSF)modeling approaches and apply the Cramér–Rao lower bound.Based on the characteristics of small PSFs,we first derive simplified equations for finding the best PL and the best intra-pixel region for an arbitrary small PSF;we then verify these equations on real PSFs.Next,we use the typical Gaussian PSF to perform a further analysis and find that the final optimum of the PL is achieved at the pixel boundaries when the Gaussian radius is as small as possible,indicating that the optimum is ultimately limited by light diffraction.Finally,we apply the maximum likelihood method.Its combination with e PSF modeling allows us to successfully reach the PL in experiments,making the above theoretical analysis effective.This work provides a new perspective on combining image sensor position control with PSF engineering to make full use of information theory,thereby paving the way for thoroughly understanding and achieving the final optimum of the PL in optical localization.

Fluid simulation of the effect of a dielectric window with high temperature on plasma parameters in inductively coupled plasma

To maintain the high-density plasma source in inductively coupled plasma(ICP),very high radiofrequency power is often delivered to the antenna,which can heat the dielectric windows near the antenna to high temperature.This high temperature can modulate the plasma characteristics to a large degree.We thus study the effect of dielectric window temperature on plasma parameters in two different ICP structures based on COMSOL software.The distributions of various plasma species are examined at different dielectric window temperatures.The concentration of neutral gas is found to be largely modulated at high dielectric window temperature,which further affects the electron collision probability with neutrals and the electron temperature.However,the electron density profiles are barely affected by the dielectric window temperature,which is mainly concentrated at the center of the reactor due to the fixed power input and pressure.

Endurance-test and theoretical prediction of a rare earth nanocathode for the applied field magnetoplasmadynamic thruster

The erosion loss of cathode is essential for the lifetime of magnetoplasmadynamic thruster(MPDT).In this work,an endurance test system for MPDT cathodes was designed and developed,and the erosion characteristics,erosion rate and erosion mechanism of the cathode were studied using the system under vacuum condition.The WCe20 hollow cathode was selected to carry out the long-term erosion of 540 h with the argon propellant supply flow rate of40 ml min^(-1),the input current of 25 A,and the central magnetic field intensity of 96 Gs.In order to predict the theoretical service life of cathode,a steady state erosion numerical model was established.The calculation results show that the total erosion rate of sputtering and evaporation is 11.58 mg h^(-1),which is slightly smaller than the test data of the average cathode corrosion rate of 12.70 mg h^(-1) in the experiment,because the experimental value includes start-up erosion rate.

Efficient cache replacement framework based on access hotness for spacecraft processors

A notable portion of cachelines in real-world workloads exhibits inner non-uniform access behaviors.However,modern cache management rarely considers this fine-grained feature,which impacts the effective cache capacity of contemporary high-performance spacecraft processors.To harness these non-uniform access behaviors,an efficient cache replacement framework featuring an auxiliary cache specifically designed to retain evicted hot data was proposed.This framework reconstructs the cache replacement policy,facilitating data migration between the main cache and the auxiliary cache.Unlike traditional cacheline-granularity policies,the approach excels at identifying and evicting infrequently used data,thereby optimizing cache utilization.The evaluation shows impressive performance improvement,especially on workloads with irregular access patterns.Benefiting from fine granularity,the proposal achieves superior storage efficiency compared with commonly used cache management schemes,providing a potential optimization opportunity for modern resource-constrained processors,such as spacecraft processors.Furthermore,the framework complements existing modern cache replacement policies and can be seamlessly integrated with minimal modifications,enhancing their overall efficacy.

Optimization Study on the Blade Profiles of A Horizontal Axis Tidal Turbine Based on BEM-CFD Model

In order to increase the performance of horizontal tidal turbines, a multi-objective optimization model was proposed in this study. Firstly, the prediction model for horizontal tidal turbines was built, which coupled the blade element momentum (BEM) theory and the CFD calculation. Secondly, a multi-objective optimization method coupled the response surface method (RSM) with the multi-objective genetic algorithm NSGA-II was applied to obtain the optimal blade profiles. The pitch angle and the chord length distribution were chosen as the design variables, while the mean power coefficient and the variance of power coefficient were chosen as the objective functions. With the mean power coefficient improved by 4.1% and the variance of power coefficient decreased by 46.7%, results showed that both objective functions could be improved.

Numerical Simulation for Hydrodynamic Characteristics of A Bionic Flapping Hydrofoil

In order to study the propulsion mechanism of the bionic flapping hydrofoil (BFH), a 2-DoF (heave and pitch) motion model is formulated. The hydrodynamic performance of BFH with a series of kinematical parameters is explored via numerical simulation based on FLUENT. The calculated result is compared with the experimental value of MIT and that by the panel method. Moreover, the effect of inlet velocity, the angle of attack, the heave amplitude, the pitch amplitude , the phase difference, the heave biased angle, the pitch biased angle and the oscillating frequency are investigated. The study is useful for guiding the design of bionic underwater vehicle based on flapping propulsion. It is indicated that the optimal parameters combination is v=0.5m/s, θ0=40°.θ0=30°,Ψ=90°,Фbias=0°,θbias=0°and f=0.5Hz .

Numerical simulation of the plasma acceleration process in a magnetically enhanced micro-cathode vacuum arc thruster

A particle-in-cell simulation is conducted to investigate the plasma acceleration process in a micro-cathode vacuum arc thruster.A coaxial electrode structure thruster with an applied magnetic field configuration is used to investigate the effects of the distribution of the magnetic field on the acceleration process and the mechanism of electrons and ions.The modeling results show that due to the small Larmor radius of electrons,they are magnetized and bound by the magnetic field lines to form a narrow electron channel.Heavy ions with a large Larmor radius take a long time to keep up with the electron movement.The presence of a magnetic field strengthens the charge separation phenomenon.The electric field caused by the charge separation is mainly responsible for the ion acceleration downstream of the computation.The impact of variations in the distribution of the magnetic field on the acceleration of the plasma is also investigated in this study,and it is found that the position of the magnetic coil relative to the thruster exit has an important impact on the acceleration of ions.In order to increase the axial velocity of heavy ions,the design should be considered to reduce the confinement of the magnetic field on the electrons in the downstream divergent part of the applied magnetic field.

Reachability analysis of switched linear discrete singular systems

This paper studies the reachability problem of the switched linear discrete singular (SLDS) systems. Under the condition that all subsystems are regular, the reachability of the SLDS systems is characterized based on a peculiar repeatedly introduced switching sequence. The necessary and sufficient conditions are obtained for the reachability of the SLDS systems.

Study on the method of precision adjustment of star sensor

Star sensors are indispensable spatial measurement sensors for high-resolution earth observation and astronomical observations, and the demand for high measurement accuracy of satellite sensors continues to increase; thus, the star sensor optical machine adjustment error cannot be ignored. The commonly used installation error correction method cannot solely meet the precision analysis requirements. In this paper, the relationship between the optical machine installation and the star sensor measurement error is analyzed, and several common adjustment error correction methods are compared. An adjustment method for optical machines is proposed to meet the requirements of very high precision star sensors. The assembly precision requirements of the investigated very high precision star sensor are analyzed considering the whole machine, and then the optical components are controlled through optical precision adjustments to satisfy the precision requirements. Finally, through the complete machine calibration, the star sensor precision adjustment for an optical machine structure is verified. This method meets the requirements of very high precision sensors and is suitable for the precision adjustment of optical machine structures, which is of practical significance to improve the precision of star sensors.

Integrated Design and Accuracy Analysis of Star Sensor and Gyro on the Same Benchmark for Satellite Attitude Determination System

As an important sensor in the navigation systems,star sensors and the gyro play important roles in spacecraft attitude determination system.Complex environmental factors are the main sources of error in attitude determination.The error influence of different benchmarks and the disintegration mode between the star sensor and the gyro is analyzed in theory.The integrated design of the star sensor and the gyro on the same benchmark can effectively avoid the error influence and improves the spacecraft attitude determination accuracy.Simulation results indicate that when the stars sensor optical axis vectors overlap the reference coordinate axis of the gyro in the same benchmark,the attitude determination accuracy improves.

Experimental and numerical investigation of a Hall thruster with a chamfered channel wall

A discharge channel with a chamfered wall not only has application in the design of modern Hall thrusters, but also exists where the channel wall is eroded, and so is a common status for these units. In this paper, the laws and mechanisms that govern the effect of the chamfered wall on the performance of a Hall thruster are investigated. By applying both experimental measurement and particle-in-cell simulation, it is determined that there is a moderate chamfer angle that can further improve the optimal performance obtained with a straight channel. This is because the chamfering of the wall near the channel exit can enhance ion acceleration and effectively reduce ion recombination on the wall, which is favorable to the promotion of the thrust and efficiency. However, the chamfer angle should not be too large; otherwise, both the density of the propellant gas and the distribution of the plasma potential in the channel are influenced, which is undesirable for efficient propellant utilization and beam concentration. Therefore, it is suggested that the chamfer shape of the channel wall is an important factor that must be carefully considered in the design of Hall thrusters.