On-orbit identification of inertia parameters of compound spacecraft using space manipulator

With the development of space technology, there will be more and more rendezvous and docking missions. After a server spacecraft is docked to a target satellite, inertia parameters of the compound spacecraft will be significantly changed. Therefore, an approach is proposed for on-orbit identification of inertia parameters of compound spacecraft using space manipulator. This method can be decomposed into two steps. The first step is to identify mass and mass center of the compound spacecraft. The second step is to identify inertia tensor of the compound spacecraft. The significant advantage of the approach is to decouple the mass, mass center and inertia tensor, without consuming valuable jet fuel, and only requires the velocities of the spacecraft to be measured, rather than acceleration and force. Simulation results and their analysis show preliminarily the effectiveness of the approach.