ESA GNC Conference Papers Repository

The JUICE - JUpiter ICy moons Explorer - mission is the first large-class mission in ESA's Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 programme. Planned for launch in 2022 and arrival at Jupiter in 2030, it will spend at least three years making detailed observations of the giant gaseous planet Jupiter and three of its largest moons, Ganymede, Callisto and Europa, through more than 25 fly-bys and a final orbiting phase around Ganymede. Airbus DS Toulouse was selected as Prime Contractor in July 2015, and is also responsible for the design and development of the AOCS Subsystem and the on-board Software. For JUICE, Airbus DS has taken special care to combine the best of past interplanetary AOCS developed in-house for ESA (Rosetta, Mex, Vex, Bepi-Colombo), and efficient AOCS innovations to optimize the mission performance and fulfil JUICE-specific constraints, like the firing of a main engine with deployed solar arrays of 100m2. Examples of such innovations are: an image-based autonomous navigation for enhanced attitude guidance during jovian moons fly-bys, a gyros and STR-based safe mode with geometrical constraints avoidance, an Orbital Energy Algorithm and autonomous safe mode recovery for achieving critical insertion manoeuvres even in case of failure, an optimized attitude guidance to manage huge gravity gradient torques in communications phases while orbiting Ganymede a main engine shaping and active control damping of solar arrays flexible modes during and after manoeuvre modes AOCS Software generation with Autocoding This presentation describes the post-PDR status of the JUICE AOCS design and analyses.