Smooth Attitude Guidance Laws for Homing Maneuvers

Attitude guidance is essential to the programming and the execution of the mission for several Earth observation and scientific systems. During the nineties, the French National Space Agency (CNES) has developed a method to cope with the constraints induced by an AOCS with momentum wheels for smooth homing maneuvers. CS lately studied the feasibility of transforming this specific process into a more generic one and is now in charge of fitting the method to the needs of the Myriad and PROTEUS platforms. This paper presents the resulting generic algorithm to compute smooth attitude guidance laws.