Re: DART nearly a bullseye

Thanks to the group for an interesting discussion of the various flavors of
rendezvous and docking technology. It's always good to get our thinking
clear on these things.

Certainly the Russian R&D systems have evolved and matured since the late
1960s. The first generation systems required lotsa help from the ground and
were more correctly termed "automated" rather than "autonomous" designs,
where "automated" refers to the absence of humans on either spacecraft.

BTW, and for the record, the infamous Progress-Mir collision was NOT due to
a problem with the Russian autonomous rendezvous and docking system. It
happened during a test of a manual docking method that the Russians wanted
to qualify as a backup to the Kurs system. The backup method relied on a TV
system and a Mir cosmonaut to complete the R&D maneuvers. The Kurs system
was not used in this test.

There were actually two tests. The first occurred on 4 March 1997 and was
unsuccessful as the Progress M-33 spacecraft (fortunately) flew past Mir, a
near miss. Moscow decided to repeat the test on 25 June 1997 with Progress
M-34. That's when the *** hit the fan and the collision occurred. On both
tests the TV system was less than adequate for the R^D task (noisy, poor
resolution) and the crew had great difficulty seeing the Progress vehicle
during the approach, visual acquisition being a backup to the backup,
apparently.

I guess you could say that progress (no pun intended) was made in this test
series since the M-34 vehicle got significantly closer to the docking port
than the M-33 spacecraft.

Reminds one of another half-assed test, Chernobyl.

Later
Ray Schmitt

"Jorge R. Frank" <jrfrank@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:Xns963C107D01D45jrfrank@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> "Ray S" <rjs41@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
> news:h8i8e.4963$dT4.4766@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:
>
>> Glad to hear that NASA's DART mission was a near 100% success. Now on
>> to a full blown autonomous rendezvous and docking demo of two unmanned
>> NASA spacecraft. Hope NASA can pull this off soon.
>>
>> The Soviets, of course, pioneered autonomous rendezvous (and docking)
>> procedures and have used them to support their Salyut and Mir space
>> stations.
>
> Not quite. The Soviets/Russians use *automated* rendezvous and autonomous
> prox ops, while DART is fully autonomous in both rendezvous and prox ops.
>
> The distinction? With the Russian system, prior to Kurs acquisition the
> maneuver plan is generated in mission control, and the Russian equivalent
> of the FDO uplinks burn solutions to the spacecraft, which dutifully
> executes them. The spacecraft has no "big picture" of the overall plan.
> Once given a target vector, DART internally generates and executes its own
> maneuver plan. The Soviets/Russians have never done anything like that.
>
> --
> JRF
>
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