ATTITUDE GUIDANCE: REDUCING THE COST OF ROTATING FROM ‘A’ TO ‘B’

Attitude guidance can improve the efficiency of rotational maneuvers and is designed to work in concert with existing attitude control systems. This paper describes the approach and how attitude guidance (specifically minimum-time maneuvering) can be modeled to support initial system design and science feasibility studies through to detailed analysis for flight. Attitude guidance can be leveraged in a variety of ways to reduce the cost of rotating from ‘A’ to ‘B’, such as improving the overall slew efficiency of flagship observatories like the James Webb Space Telescope or the Roman Space Telescope. Attitude guidance can be implemented via Hamiltonian programming as part of a mission operations ground process. Autonomy for event-driven architectures is also conceivable with present-day flight processors by using neural networks to autogenerate attitude guidance commands on orbit.