DEVELOPMENT OF ON-ORBIT PREDICTIONS FOR THE MIDDECK ACTIVE CONTROL EXPERIMENT

The paper presents the modeling and control design issues associated w ith a change in the operating environment for the Middeck Active Contr ol Experiment (MACE): a Shuttle program scheduled to fly on STS-67, Ma rch 1995. MACE was designed to investigate the extent to which the on- orbit behavior of flexible spacecraft can be predicted and controlled using analysis and ground testing. In this paper, a refined analytic m odel is used to predict the on-orbit dynamics, and several techniques for estimating the on-orbit errors are discussed. Current closed-loop results using error models based on prior ground experiments predict a 35 dB performance improvement.