Hello, everyone.

Today we'll talk about rendezvous and rendezvous phases.

Basically, the rendezvous is the action of bringing together two spacecraft,
and most of the time what we have is a spacecraft on the ground,
and we name it the chaser.
And the other spacecraft is on orbit, the target, and we abbreviate it
we with TGT, and the action of the rendezvous is to bring together
the chaser with the target.
Most of the time, we have the target being passive
and the chaser is active.
The target is also on a circular orbit.
We'll only consider cases where the target is on circular orbit
with eccentricity zero.
Now what you see here is the Earth with the Earth equator here.
We have the chaser on the launchpad, typically Kennedy Space Center, Florida,
28.5 degrees northern latitude,
or it can be Baikonur for Soyuz.
And we have the target on orbit.
We have the inclination of the orbit here which is larger
than the latitude of the launch site for the chaser,
which is one of the conditions.
You cannot go to, for instance, the equatorial orbit.
Target on the equatorial orbit launching from a launch site,
which has a latitude different from zero degrees.
We need to have inclination of the orbit of the target larger
than the latitude of the launch site.
So these are the initial conditions.
The final conditions are chaser and target at the same location in space
with the same vectorial velocity.
Then, after the rendezvous completes, you have either a docking of the chaser
with the target which is the case for Soyuz
and the International Space Station, for instance.
Or you have a grapple with the robot arm
which was the case when we had the rendezvous
between the Shuttle and the Hubble Space Telescope.
We'll talk about that later.
Well, here we are.
We lifted off with a chaser, and one of the important conditions
is we have to come with the chaser on an orbit
which is co-planar with the plane of the orbit
of the target,
or nearly co-planar because we'll come initially
to a lower orbit and normally behind the target.
And, of course, it would be somewhat of a differential nodal regression
because of the difference in altitude
of our two orbits, the chaser and the target.
So it's not exactly in the plane of the orbit of the target,
but we lift off at such a time, and we commit to an orbit
such that when we complete the rendezvous,
we'll be in exactly the same plane or pretty exactly in the same plane.
We saw before that any plane change is very expensive in propellant
so you try to minimize these plane changes for the chaser
when you get close to the target.
Now here you are, on your orbit with the chaser.
Initially, you are pretty far away from the target
so you count on the ground.
You expect the ground to provide you with the maneuvers to be performed
in order to complete the rendezvous within typically 48 hours.
That was the case for the Shuttle and Soyuz also in the past.
Right now we can perform this rendezvous much quicker
in about 6 hours because of the much better accuracy we have
with the determination of the orbit using GPS,
which we didn't have before.
So initially, we have a ground-targeted rendezvous process,
and when we get close enough, we can use sensors inside the chaser,
typically for the Shuttle
it was star tracker.
And also the rendezvous radar.
Star tracker was giving us the azimuth and elevation
of the target versus the chaser, and the rendezvous radar
is providing azimuth and elevation and range and range rate.
The distance in feet and the range rate in feet per second.
And all this data incorporated into the relative state vector
of the target versus the chaser.
And this is used in order to know exactly or pretty exactly
where the target is versus the chaser.
And at the end of the rendezvous, we do onboard targeted process
where we use all this data
to perform precisely the end of the rendezvous.
Now it's really a matter of relative state vector.
The state vector of the chaser is <i>X dot, Y dot, Z dot</i>
Same for the target, <i>X dot, Y dot, Z dot</i>
The difference between the two gives you the position of the target
versus the chaser, its distance and its range rate.
Toward the end of the rendezvous, we have here the Space Shuttle
making a rendezvous with one of the early configurations
of the International Space Station, where we had only two elements.
We have on the far right side, the Zarya module,
which is the first Russian module.
Then we have the first Node, American Node or the Unity Node
that is attached to it.
And the proximity operation is the final portion of the rendezvous,
where the Space Shuttle, it can be Soyuz also,
determined the range, the range rate, RDOT,
means range rate in ft/s.
Then the LOS is for line of sight.
It's really azimuth and elevation with respect to a frame
attached to the Shuttle itself.
And when get to PROX OPS, at least with the Shuttle
it was all manually operated flying of the Space Shuttle
to come very close to the target for a docking with the ISS
or for grapple with the Hubble Space Telescope,
but these operations were all manual, performed normally
by the commander in the case of the Shuttle.
That's still automatic with a Soyuz spacecraft
with a manual backup if needed.
Now this is the final approach, and we have two examples here
with the Space Shuttle approaching the Hubble Space Telescope,
and you see in the upper drawing, the robot arm of the Space Shuttle
that has been deployed already because the end of the rendezvous
with the Hubble Space Telescope was with the grapple
of the telescope but insulation of the payload bay.
In the bottom, you see the approach of Shuttle
to the International Space Station.
It just happens that Hubble was inertially stabilized.
Its orientation was always kept the same
with respect to the inertial frame, so we had to match the orientation
of the Shuttle to the orientation of the Hubble Space Telescope.
So we went to inertial hold for the Space Shuttle.
Basically, flying the Space Shuttle is a 6 degree freedom operation,
You have 3 degrees of freedom rotation, pitch, yaw, and roll,
and 3 degrees of freedom translation, up, down, left, right
and forward, aft.
And what we did with the Space Shuttle for any rendezvous
whether with Hubble or with International Space Station
was to have the digital autopilot which is a capability in the Shuttle
to take care of all the rotations, and the translations
were performed manually by the commander.
So, again, inertial hold for an approach to the Hubble Space Telescope
because it was or it still is inertially stabilized.
However, with the International Space Station,
which always keeps the same orientation with respect to the Earth reference
below the station, typically keeps the same circle LVLH,
local vertical, local horizontal attitude.
Then we had to ask the digital autopilot or command the digital autopilot
of the shuttle to be also LVLH stabilized.
And then again, the commander or the pilot was performing the rendezvous
commanding only the translations and not the rotations.
Now we have some pictures illustrating all of this.
This is a view of the payload bay of the Space Shuttle,
a scene from one of the windows in the aft part of the cockpit
of the spaceship.
And you see the payload bay; you see the two parts in the back
containing propellants for attitude control and part
of the vertical tail also.
And in the foreground, you see the docking interface of the Shuttle
with the International Space Station.
You see the three petals, and on the other side, on the ISS side,
you also have a similar congregation of three petals
which were just merging each other
as the Shuttle was approaching and mating with ISS.
Here you have the Space Shuttle that has docked with ISS.
So the docking interface was relatively close to the aft part of the cockpit
so it gave the crew good visibility to this final and very critical phase
of the rendezvous, and approach, and final docking.
You see also on this picture, the robot arm of the Space Shuttle
deployed on the righthand side,
and you see the robot arm of the Station which is on the left side of the picture.
Now in case of rendezvous of the Space Shuttle
with the Hubble Space Telescope as mentioned,
you didn't have docking,
but you had a grapple of the telescope with the remote manipulator system
of the Shuttle or the robot arm of the Shuttle
which was manually commanded by one of the mission specialists.
Now, the Shuttle always had to come in close proximity
with a well-planned relative position of the spacecraft
with the Hubble Space Telescope in order to make the grapple
relatively easy on one hand and also far away from obstacles
like the antennas of the telescope or the solar arrays of the instruments.
So it was a relatively difficult task.
It had to be performed very precisely, but it was trained a lot
in the simulator and was always successful for all the servicing missions of
Hubble.
There were five total until 2009.
Now, you have another example of end of the rendezvous and grapple,
and this time, it's a view from the International Space Station of HTV,
which is a Japanese resupply vehicle of the station
which has just been grappled
with the Space Station robotic manipulator system
commanded by the crew normally from the cupola
of the International Space Station.
You just had the grapple performed, and then using the same robot arm,
the resupply vehicle is going to be brought through a mating position
of the station for the crew to be able to get the content of the vehicle.