Seeker 1.0 GNC Flight Performance (presentation)

Abstract

Seeker is an automated extravehicular inspection spacecraft that was designed and built in-house at the NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) over approximate-ly 18 months with a budget of $1.8 million. This first version of Seeker is in-tended to be an incremental development towards an advanced inspection ca-pability. Seeker launched onboard the NG-11 Cygnus mission in 2019 and de-ployed from Cygnus on September 16, 2019. Downlinked telemetry, imagery from the chaser and target spacecraft, and onboard engineering data logs are used to provide an analysis of the system’s performance. This paper reviews the performance of the Seeker vehicle with a focus on the guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) system. The results are presented with a discussion of the re-lated system design to highlight how decisions and applied methods culminated in the observed performance.