Spacecraft Formation Relative Orbits Coursera

Overview

This Spacecraft Formation Relative Orbits course offered by Coursera in partnership with University of Colorado Boulder studies spacecraft relative orbits. This is of interest to mission scenarios including rendezvous and docking, inspection circumnavigation trajectories, on orbit assembly, space debris mitigation, or interferometric science applications in space.

Key facts

• It assumes the learner has already had a complete course on orbital mechanics of a single spacecraft including solutions to the 2-body problem, solving time of flight problems, and understanding J2-perturbations on a spacecraft, as well as how to develop relative orbit feedback control solutions.  

• The specialization is of interest to researchers who need to learn the fundamentals of deriving relative equations of motion about circular, elliptical or even hyperbolic reference orbits. 

• Both nonlinear and linearized relative orbit descriptions are explored and compared, including curvilinear Cartesian coordinates and orbit element differences.  Analytical relative motion solutions are developed to understand fundamental relative motion prototypes.

Skills you'll gain

• Spacecraft rendezvous

• Orbital perturbations

• Relative orbit design

• Nonlinear control

• Relative motion control

• stability analysis

• Develop relative motion feedback control