The Psyche spacecraft is in flight to the asteroid of the same name in the belt. See subsequent web links for more information on the mission. The project’s Guidance, Navigation & Control team supports the spacecraft’s flight operations and ongoing development and verification & validation (V&V) for later phases of the mission. The team has a number of open tasks that are well suited for internship.
Description:
The first thrust is an in-depth analysis of flight performance to date. Data from flight is to be collected and compared to expectations, in particular as indicated by simulation models. Key considerations will be multi-body attitude dynamics, environmental disturbances, and the performance of hardware such as gyros, sun sensors, star trackers, reaction wheels, electric and cold gas thrusters, and gimbal potentiometers and motors.
The second thrust will focus on the verification of attitude control laws. Variants use cold gas thrusters, reaction wheels, or electric thruster gimbals. Frequency-domain stability margins will be verified in high-fidelity time-domain simulation by modifying actuator models to have different gains and lags.
