Time-of-Flight Monitoring Camera System of the De-orbiting Drag Sail for Microsatellite ALE-1

抄録

ALE-1 is a technology demonstration microsatellite with the mission objective of generating artificial shooting stars. It was launched in January 2019 to an orbital altitude of 500 km. There are manned missions at a lower altitude in the International Space Station (ISS), therefore the altitude of ALE-1 needs to be lowered below the ISS before the mission starts. The de-orbit technology being used is a deployable and separable drag sail. In this paper, a novel non-intrusive method to collect and process dynamic behavior data of deployable space structures using a Time-of-Flight monitoring camera system is presented. This camera system collects distance information on the sail, and the collected data is downlinked to the ground for analysis. With this module, better insight into the dynamic behavior of the flexible components of the de-orbiting system, namely the boom and the drag sail, can be obtained. This paper also presents the data processing method for the shape estimation and surface reconstruction of the drag sail. The acquired analysis results can be utilized to better understand the dynamic behavior of deployable space structures and drag sails, in order to achieve more accurate de-orbiting simulations and predictions.