RVS®3000-3D LIDAR – 3D IMAGING AND POSE ESTIMATION DURING FIRST GEO SATELLITE SERVICING

The first GEO satellite servicing mission was performed by the successful docking of Northrop Grumman’s (NG) Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV) MEV-1 to Intelsat IS901 in February 2020. Jena-Optronik GmbH provided the 3D LIDAR system, a visual camera system with six optical heads and two star sensors as part of a set of vision system to guide the automated docking. The 3D LIDAR, RVS®3000-3D, benefits from the legacy of 48 delivered RVS® sensors and its successor, RVS®3000, which reached TRL9 via several flights to ISS on NG Cygnus vehicles from 2019. While RVS® and RVS®3000 are dedicated to tracking and identification of retro-reflector objects on flights to ISS, the RVS®3000- 3D enables docking without retro reflectors. To this end, powerful algorithms and hardware for real-time 6 Degree-of-Freedom (6DOF) pose estimation of an uncooperative satellite in space have been implemented. Here we present and discuss performance of the RVS®3000-3D using in-orbit data from MEV.