The ULTOR® Passive Pose and Position Engine (P3E) technology, developed by Advanced Optical Systems, Inc (AOS), uses real-time image correlation to provide relative position and pose data for spacecraft guidance, navigation, and control. Potential data sources include a wide variety of sensors, including visible and infrared cameras. ULTOR® P3E has been demonstrated on a number of host processing platforms. NASA is integrating ULTOR® P3E into its Relative Navigation System (RNS), which is being developed for the upcoming Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Servicing Mission 4 (SM4). During SM4 ULTOR® P3E will perform realtime pose and position measurements during both the approach and departure phases of the mission. This paper describes the RNS implementation of ULTOR® P3E, and presents results from NASA's hardware-in-the-loop simulation testing against the HST mockup.

Date Published: 15 April 2008
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 6958, Sensors and Systems for Space Applications II, 69580I (15 April 2008); doi: 10.1117/12.777193

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6958:
Sensors and Systems for Space Applications II
Richard T. Howard; Pejmun Motaghedi, Editor(s)