Model-based FDIR and Fault Accommodation for a Rendezvous Mission around the Mars Planet: the Mars Sample Return Case

The research work presented in the paper addresses the design of a model-based fault diagnosis and fault recovery system for any faults occurring in the actuator and sensor units of the chaser spacecraft of the ESA Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission. Key features of the proposed method are the use of a parity space and covariance-based strategy with jointly a H∞ observer for fault diagnosis of sensor faults, a H∞/H- filter for robust fault detection of actuator faults and a bank of unknown input observers jointly used with a dot product of vectors strategy for actuator faults. For fault accommodation, a ”retreat” FDIR strategy scheduled by the FDI unit, is retained. The proposed FDIR architecture obeys to a hierarchical one and fits the industrial requirements. Especially, it is compliant with the Aurora avionics architecture. A simulation campaign, based on a nonlinear high-fidelity simulator developed by GMV space and Thales Alenia Space industries, is conducted under highly realistic conditions.