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Engineering topics

Josh Miller

Publications and source records attributed to Josh Miller.

Risks from Small Orbital Debris

This talk provides evidence that the threat to mission success from millimeter sized debris is a legitimate concern by considering (1) on-orbit impact data, (2) hypervelocity tests on spacecraft systems, (3) risk assessments for ISS and satellites.

Orbital Debris↗

Efficient Onboard Attitude Commanding for Fast Maneuvering of Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

To support Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s extended science missions, an algorithm for autonomous optimization of fast occultation avoidance maneuvers was developed. The fast attitude maneuvers are inserted to the spacecraft attitude control system as trajectories to be tracked. Executing maneuvers in this way requires transmission and storage of a large number of time-tagged attitude waypoints on the spacecraft. For more efficient day-to-day operations, an interpolating filter was designed to perform onboard interpolation between sparse samples of commands. The interpolating filter – called FastXMan for efficient fast maneuvering – was patched into LRO’s flight software in late 2023 and is presently operational. This paper presents an overview of the issues related to the practical implementation of the filter and illustrates the flight performance of the new scheme.

Operations↗