Model-Based On-Board Realtime Thruster Fault Monitoring

Fault monitoring is a vital part of every satellite mission. Especially for rendezvous scenarios a reliable and fast actuator fault detection is indispensable to avoid collision between both spacecraft. To reduce expensive monitoring hardware, a model-based thruster fault approach, only depending on a gyro is developed. It is able to reliably detect thruster stuck closed, thruster stuck open and leaking thruster faults in short time. Monte Carlo results produced in a complete satellite simulator are presented to show fault detection and isolation performance of the proposed algorithms.