Resuming Activities for PRISMA
Thus, the following months were used to check the left financial and personnel resources and to completely redesign the experiment. The initial experiment duration was reduced to one week. In parallel, negotiations with OHB Sweden about additional costs and the scheduling were conducted and it took a long time until an agreement could be achieved, but we finally succeeded.
The experiment named ARGON (Advanced Rendezvous demo using GPS and Optical Navigation) will be conducted from Sweden for five days. Beginning on 24th April 2012, a team of five colleagues form the GSOC Spaceflight Technology department will supervise the execution of the last GSOC experiment from Solna. They will fully concentrate on ARGON whilst the flight operations are carried out by the OHB-SE personnel. It was absolutely clear for all participants, that the PRISMA satellites could not be operated by GSOC again only for this experiment. The effort for preparation and conduction of a safe control handover would be out of all proportion to the ARGON experiment.
The main task of ARGON is to perform a ground-based rendezvous to a non-cooperative Client (Tango) using angle-only vision-based measurements from approximately 30 km down to 3 km separation. The experiment will be highly representative of the on-orbit-servicing scenario envisioned for the DLR's DEOS mission, which is currently in a preliminary design phase (Phase-B).
Herewith, I am delighted in announcing another Blog entry soon, which will report about execution and the results of ARGON.
