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At least 325 records · Page 18

The IRIS-GUS Shuttle Borne Upper Stage System

This paper describes the Italian Research Interim Stage - Gyroscopic Upper Stage (IRIS-GUS) upper stage system that will be used to launch NASA's Triana Observatory from the Space Shuttle. Triana is a pathfinder earth science mission being executed on rapid schedule and small budget, therefore the mission's upper stage solution had to be a system that could be fielded quickly at relatively low cost and risk. The building of the IRIS-GUS system wa necessary because NASA lost the capability to launch moderately sized upper stage missions fro the Space Shuttle when the PAM-D system was retired. The IRIS-GUS system restores this capability. The resulting system is a hybrid which mates the existing, flight proven IRIS (Italian Research Interim Stage) airborne support equipment to a new upper stage, the Gyroscopic Upper Stage (GUS) built by the GSFC for Triana. Although a new system, the GUS exploits flight proven hardware and design approaches in most subsystems, in some cases implementing proven design approaches with state-of-the-art electronics. This paper describes the IRIS-GUS upper stage system elements, performance capabilities, and payload interfaces.

Tooley, Craig↗

Turbine Engine Stability/Instability With Rub Forces Axisymmetric Rotor-Support Stiffness

The stability/instability condition of a turbine rotor with axisymmetric supports is determined in the presence of gyroscopic loads and rub-induced destabilizing forces. A modal representation of the turbine engine is used, with one mode in each of the vertical and horizontal planes. The use of non-spinning rotor modes permits an explicit treatment of gyroscopic effects. The two linearized modal equations of motion of a rotor with axisymmetric supports are reduced to a single equation in a complex variable. The resulting eigenvalues yield explicit expressions at the stability boundary, for the whirl frequency as well as the required damping for stability in the presence of the available rub-induced destabilization. Conversely, the allowable destabilization in the presence of the available damping is also given.

Gallardo, Vicente↗

Laboratory Investigation of Two Autopilots for a 4/10-Scale Drop Model of the Grumman F8F-1 Airplane, TED No. NACA 2466

Performance investigation and frequency response analyses were con- ducted en two autopilot control systems designed for use in the 0.4-scale model of the Grumman F8F-1 airplane. The first system, based on the action of a displacement gyroscope only, was investigated to find the cause of a small-amplitude pitch oscillation which had been noted in previous flight tests. The results of the investigation conducted revealed that, although the autopilot-model combination was dynamically stable, a hunting oscillation was possible due to a change in autopilot characteristics in a dive. This hunting condition can be eliminated by increasing the gyroscope pickoff dead spot without greatly reducing dynamic stability of the autopilot-model combination.

Teitelbaum, Jerome M.↗

Turbomachinery Application of Lagrangian Dynamics to the Motion of Continuous Discrete Rotors

The stability/instability condition of a turbine rotor with axisymmetric supports is determined in the presence of gyroscopic loads and rub-induced destabilizing forces. A modal representation of the turbine engine is used, with one mode in each of the vertical and horizontal planes. The use of non-spinning rotor modes permits an explicit treatment of gyroscopic effects. The two linearized modal equations of motion of a rotor with axisymmetric supports are reduced to a single equation in a complex variable. The resulting eigenvalues yield explicit expressions at the stability boundary, for the whirl frequency as well as the required damping in the presence of the available rub-induced destabilization. Conversely, the allowable destabilization in the presence of the available damping is also given.

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STS-114 Flight Day 7 Highlights

The main event of Day 7 is an extravehicular activity (EVA) to remove a failed Control Moment Gyroscope (CMG) from the Z1 Truss of the International Space Station (ISS) (Commander Sergei Krikalev and NASA ISS Science Officer and Flight Engineer John Phillips), and install a replacement stored in the payload of Space Shuttle Discovery (Commander Eileen Collins, Pilot James Kelly, Mission Specialists Soichi Noguchi, Stephen Robinson, Andrew Thomas, Wendy Lawrence, and Charles Camarda). Discovery astronauts Noguchi and Robinson are assisted in suit-up by their fellow crew members, Noguchi is carried by the Space Station Remote Manipulator System between Discovery's payload bay and the Z1 truss in order to exchange the gyroscopes with help from the pistol grip tool. Mission Control speaks to him during the EVA in order to troubleshoot the power and data connectors for new CMG. When back in the open payload bay, Noguchi and Robinson pose for pictures of each other and the Earth.

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Wide Field Camera 3 Accommodations for HST Robotics Servicing Mission

This slide presentation discusses the objectives of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Robotics Servicing and Deorbit Mission (HRSDM), reviews the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), and also reviews the contamination accomodations for the WFC3. The objectives of the HRSDM are (1) to provide a disposal capability at the end of HST's useful life, (2) to upgrade the hardware by installing two new scientific instruments: replace the Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR) with the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS), and to replace the Wide Field/Planetary Camera-2 (WFPC2) with Wide Field Camera-3, and (3) Extend the Scientific life of HST for a minimum of 5 years after servicing. Included are slides showing the Hubble Robotic Vehicle (HRV) and slides describing what the HRV contains. There are also slides describing the WFC3. One of the mechanisms of the WFC3 is to serve partially as replacement gyroscopes for HST. There are also slides that discuss the contamination requirements for the Rate Sensor Units (RSUs), that are part of the Rate Gyroscope Assembly on the WFC3.

Ginyard, Amani↗

Observer-Based Magnetic Bearing Controller Developed for Aerospace Flywheels

A prototype of a versatile, observer-based magnetic bearing controller for aerospace flywheels was successfully developed and demonstrated on a magnetic bearing test rig (see the photograph) and an actual flywheel module. The objective of this development included a fast, yet low risk, control development process, and a robust, high-performance controller for a large variety of flywheels. This required a good system model, an efficient development procedure, and a model-based controller that addressed the key problems associated with flywheel and bearing imbalance, sensor error, and vibration. The model used in this control development and tuning procedure included the flexible rotor dynamics and motor-induced vibrations. Such a model was essential for low-risk scheduling of speed-dependent control parameters and for reliable evaluation of novel control strategies. The successfully tested control prototype utilized an extended Kalman filter to estimate the true rotor principal-axis motion from the raw sensor position feedback. For control refinement, the extended Kalman filter also estimated and eliminated the combined effects of mass-imbalance and sensor runouts from the input data. A key advantage of the design based on the extended Kalman filter is its ability to accurately estimate both the rotor's principal-axis position and gyroscopic rates with the least amount of phase lag. This is important for control parameter scheduling to dampen the gyroscopic motions. Because of large uncertainties in the magnetic bearing and imbalance characteristics, this state-estimation scheme alone is insufficient for containing the rotor motion within the desired 1-mil excursion radius. A nonlinear gain adjustment based on an estimation of the principal-axis orbit size was needed to provide a coarse (nonoptimal), but robust, control of the orbit growth. Control current minimization was achieved with a (steepest gradient) search of synchronous errors in the principal-axis position input data. Actual flywheel tests of this observer-based controller (developed entirely in-house) at the NASA Glenn Research Center showed that the model correctly predicted the rotor orbit growth as a function of rotational speed, and it demonstrated the capability of gain adjustments to arrest this growth. Data from these tests on an actual flywheel module spun to 26,000 rpm proved that the controller was able to contain the shaft motion to within much less than 0.5 mils of radial excursion with axis currents less than 300 mA in root-mean-square estimate. The test speed range was limited because of thermal expansion concerns for this particular flywheel unit, not because of any deficiency in the controller. Simulations for this unit indicated that the controller should be robust up to its top operating speed of 60,000 rpm. Aside from these important achievements, and most significantly, it took less than 1 week to adapt this controller from the simple test rig to the actual flywheel and to demonstrate full five-axis levitation and control. This demonstration showed that both the controller and the model-based development and tuning framework are easily adaptable to a wide range of rotors and bearing configurations and, hence, are capable of reducing design risks and costs for many future flywheel technology developments.

Le, Dzu K.↗

Hubble Space Telescope - First Servicing Mission

Space Shuttle mission STS-61 was the first of several planned servicing missions for HST, intended to periodically replace failed components and upgrade scientific instruments with improved versions to keep the telescope viable and productive throughout its planned 15-year lifetime. This First Servicing Mission was also intended to correct several design flaws that were detected shortly after the launch of HST. There were three overall mission objectives for the STS-61 repair mission: 1) To Restore the Planned Scientific Capabilities: One complexity of the First Servicing Mission was the necessity for adding optical elements in the light path to correct the spherical aberration. These corrective optics were required to provide the quantitative science capability to enable key scientific programs to be carried out as originally planned. The addition of the COSTAR and the installation of WFPC2 both contributed to recovering these capabilities. 2) To Restore the Reliability of Vehicle Systems: Failed or degraded components had depleted some of the original subsystem redundancy, which had to be restored to allow continued science operations until the next servicing mission in 1997. Anomalous components that required servicing included the solar arrays, gyroscope sensing units, gyroscope electronics, magnetometers, solar array drive electronics, and electrical fuses. 3) To Validate the On-Orbit Servicing Concept for HST: Validation of the concept of on-orbit servicing as the way to achieve HST's full 15-year life was required to provide a foundation for future servicing missions.

Source record↗

Gravity Probe B Timing System and Roll Phase Determination

An oven-controlled crystal oscillator at 16.368 MHz provides clock signals to all GP-B components and synchronizes the data collection, transmission and processing. The sampled science data signals are stamped with the vehicle time, a counter of the 10Hz data strobe divided down from the clock. The GPS receiver supplies an external reference for time transfer between the vehicle time and coordinated universal time. Ground and space flight tests show the time transfer error is within 1 microsecond. The time latency between the effective sample time of science signals and the stamped vehicle time is verified to 1 ms in the ground tests. The GP-B satellite is controlled to roll with a period of 77.5 sec about an axis along the direction to the guide star to average out the disturbance torques fixed to the body of the satellite and reduce the gyroscope readout noise. The roll phase is determined on the ground to high accuracy with the telemetry data from two star trackers and used in the data analysis to separate the drifts of gyroscope spin axes in the orbital plane and perpendicular to the orbital plane. The flight data shows that the roll phase is controlled to within 40 arcsec with a measurement uncertainty of 7 arcsec.

Jie, Li↗

Reaction Wheel Disturbance Model Extraction Software - RWDMES

The RWDMES is a tool for modeling the disturbances imparted on spacecraft by spinning reaction wheels. Reaction wheels are usually the largest disturbance source on a precision pointing spacecraft, and can be the dominating source of pointing error. Accurate knowledge of the disturbance environment is critical to accurate prediction of the pointing performance. In the past, it has been difficult to extract an accurate wheel disturbance model since the forcing mechanisms are difficult to model physically, and the forcing amplitudes are filtered by the dynamics of the reaction wheel. RWDMES captures the wheel-induced disturbances using a hybrid physical/empirical model that is extracted directly from measured forcing data. The empirical models capture the tonal forces that occur at harmonics of the spin rate, and the broadband forces that arise from random effects. The empirical forcing functions are filtered by a physical model of the wheel structure that includes spin-rate-dependent moments (gyroscopic terms). The resulting hybrid model creates a highly accurate prediction of wheel-induced forces. It accounts for variation in disturbance frequency, as well as the shifts in structural amplification by the whirl modes, as the spin rate changes. This software provides a point-and-click environment for producing accurate models with minimal user effort. Where conventional approaches may take weeks to produce a model of variable quality, RWDMES can create a demonstrably high accuracy model in two hours. The software consists of a graphical user interface (GUI) that enables the user to specify all analysis parameters, to evaluate analysis results and to iteratively refine the model. Underlying algorithms automatically extract disturbance harmonics, initialize and tune harmonic models, and initialize and tune broadband noise models. The component steps are described in the RWDMES user s guide and include: converting time domain data to waterfall PSDs (power spectral densities); converting PSDs to order analysis data; extracting harmonics; initializing and simultaneously tuning a harmonic model and a wheel structural model; initializing and tuning a broadband model; and verifying the harmonic/broadband/structural model against the measurement data. Functional operation is through a MATLAB GUI that loads test data, performs the various analyses, plots evaluation data for assessment and refinement of analysis parameters, and exports the data to documentation or downstream analysis code. The harmonic models are defined as specified functions of frequency, typically speed-squared. The reaction wheel structural model is realized as mass, damping, and stiffness matrices (typically from a finite element analysis package) with the addition of a gyroscopic forcing matrix. The broadband noise model is realized as a set of speed-dependent filters. The tuning of the combined model is performed using nonlinear least squares techniques. RWDMES is implemented as a MATLAB toolbox comprising the Fit Manager for performing the model extraction, Data Manager for managing input data and output models, the Gyro Manager for modifying wheel structural models, and the Harmonic Editor for evaluating and tuning harmonic models. This software was validated using data from Goodrich E wheels, and from GSFC Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) wheels. The validation testing proved that RWDMES has the capability to extract accurate disturbance models from flight reaction wheels with minimal user effort.

Blaurock, Carl↗

Tracking Positions and Attitudes of Mars Rovers

The Surface Attitude Position and Pointing (SAPP) software, which runs on computers aboard the Mars Exploration Rovers, tracks the positions and attitudes of the rovers on the surface of Mars. Each rover acquires data on attitude from a combination of accelerometer readings and images of the Sun acquired autonomously, using a pointable camera to search the sky for the Sun. Depending on the nature of movement commanded remotely by operators on Earth, the software propagates attitude and position by use of either (1) accelerometer and gyroscope readings or (2) gyroscope readings and wheel odometry. Where necessary, visual odometry is performed on images to fine-tune the position updates, particularly on high-wheel-slip terrain. The attitude data are used by other software and ground-based personnel for pointing a high-gain antenna, planning and execution of driving, and positioning and aiming scientific instruments.

Ali, Khaled↗

DSMC Simulations of Disturbance Torque to ISS During Airlock Depressurization

The primary attitude control system on the International Space Station (ISS) is part of the United States On-orbit Segment (USOS) and uses Control Moment Gyroscopes (CMG). The secondary system is part of the Russian On orbit Segment (RSOS) and uses a combination of gyroscopes and thrusters. Historically, events with significant disturbances such as the airlock depressurizations associated with extra-vehicular activity (EVA) have been performed using the RSOS attitude control system. This avoids excessive propulsive "de-saturations" of the CMGs. However, transfer of attitude control is labor intensive and requires significant propellant. Predictions employing NASA's DSMC Analysis Code (DAC) of the disturbance torque to the ISS for depressurization of the Pirs airlock on the RSOS will be presented [1]. These predictions were performed to assess the feasibility of using USOS control during these events. The ISS Pirs airlock is vented using a device known as a "T-vent" as shown in the inset in figure 1. By orienting two equal streams of gas in opposite directions, this device is intended to have no propulsive effect. However, disturbance force and torque to the ISS do occur due to plume impingement. The disturbance torque resulting from the Pirs depressurization during EVAs is estimated by using a loosely coupled CFD/DSMC technique [2]. CFD is used to simulate the flow field in the nozzle and the near field plume. DSMC is used to simulate the remaining flow field using the CFD results to create an in flow boundary to the DSMC simulation. Due to the highly continuum nature of flow field near the T-vent, two loosely coupled DSMC domains are employed. An 88.2 cubic meter inner domain contains the Pirs airlock and the T-vent. Inner domain results are used to create an in flow boundary for an outer domain containing the remaining portions of the ISS. Several orientations of the ISS solar arrays and radiators have been investigated to find cases that result in minimal disturbance torque. Figure 1 shows surface pressure contours on the ISS and a plane of number density contours for a particular case.

Lumpkin, F. E., III↗

Systems and Methods for Determining Inertial Navigation System Faults

An inertial navigation system (INS) includes a primary inertial navigation system (INS) unit configured to receive accelerometer measurements from an accelerometer and angular velocity measurements from a gyroscope. The primary INS unit is further configured to receive global navigation satellite system (GNSS) signals from a GNSS sensor and to determine a first set of kinematic state vectors based on the accelerometer measurements, the angular velocity measurements, and the GNSS signals. The INS further includes a secondary INS unit configured to receive the accelerometer measurements and the angular velocity measurements and to determine a second set of kinematic state vectors of the vehicle based on the accelerometer measurements and the angular velocity measurements. A health management system is configured to compare the first set of kinematic state vectors and the second set of kinematic state vectors to determine faults associated with the accelerometer or the gyroscope based on the comparison.

Bharadwaj, Raj Mohan↗

Unconventional inertial sensors.

Inertial sensors reviewing ring laser, electrostatic fluid sphere, magnetic resonance, superconductivity gyroscope, relativistic rotating tensor, vortex rate and quantum mechanical effect sensing

INERTIAL ACCELEROMETER↗

Dynamics of vibratory microgyroscopes

In this report we provide a vectorial derivation of the equations of motion characterizing the dynamite behavior of both ideal and non-ideal vibratory micromachined gyroscopes.

MEMS gyroscopes vibratory gyroscopes↗

Geometric Phase in Anisotropic Kepler Problem: Perspective for Realization in Rydberg Atoms

We predict a gyroscopic effect that can be demonstrated with Rydberg atoms following the dynamics of a Kepler Hamiltonian with an additional uniaxial anisotropy induced by optical ponderomotive force. This effect is analogous to the rotation of the Foucault pendulum in response to the Earth’s rotation. Furthermore, we argue that in Rydberg states with a large principal quantum number a similar geometric angle can be generated by mechanical rotations of an atomic-optical setup on timescales between 1 μ⁢s and 1 ms.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗