EXPERIMENTS IN MODERN CONTROL ON-BOARD IRAS

The paper describes algorithms for on-board commanding, estimation and control of the attitude of manoeuvring spacecraft using an on-board computer. Their performance is demonstrated in in-flight experiments with the Infra Red Astronomical Satellite. The following items are discussed: - on-board conmanding of the spacecraft attitude motion, - a model following control technique for attitude manoeuvring, - an estimator for state feedback and disturbance torque compensation, - a Kalman filter for inertial-optical attitude determination and estimation of gyro parameters. Part of this work was done under contract with the Netherlands Agency for Aerospace Programs NIVR.