Flight software development for the ION-F formation flying mission

An overview of the flight software development for the Ionospheric Observation Nanosatellite Formation (ION-F) is presented. ION-F, a constellation of three 15 kg satellites to be launched from the Space Shuttle in mid-2002, is designed as an experiment in formation flying technologies. The satellites will utilize micro-pulsed plasma thrusters and an integrated GPS/cross-link system to allow fast and accurate update of relative satellite positions. This paper describes the ION-F formation flying mission, flight software development to date, and simulation results. A nonlinear simulation environment (hardware in the loop) has been developed that includes the full nonlinear orbital dynamics in FreeFlyer/sup TM/, and nonlinear attitude dynamics in MATLAB/sup TM/. The simulation allows extensive flight software development to take place by integrating modules developed in C/C++ within the MATLAB environment.