21st Congress of International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences, Melbourne, Australia, 13-18 September, 1998
Paper ICAS-98-1.1.3

FLIGHT TESTING OF ALFLEX GUIDANCE, NAVIGATION AND CONTROL SYSTEM

Miyazawa Y., Nagayasu M., *Nakayasu H.
National Aerospace Laboratory, Japan; *National Space Development Agency, Japan

Keywords: re-entry space vehicle, automatic landing, flight testing

Automatic Landing Flight Experiment (ALFLEX) is a research program conducted by the National Aerospace Laboratory and National Space Development Agency of Japan in order to investigate automatic landing technology for the future development of a Japanese unmanned reusable reentry space vehicle. Due to the bare airframe's instability and the landing performance requirement, the flight control for the space vehicle's horizontal landing is one of the key technologies. The ALFLEX vehicle, a 37% sub-scale model of a planned reentry space vehicle, and a flight experiment system were developed. The ALFLEX vehicle is equipped with up-to-date avionics, including a high performance flight control computer. The vehicle performed 13 landing flight trials successfully at Woomera, Australia, in 1996. It satisfied the predetermined performance and the flight test result has demonstrated technological readiness for the future reentry space vehicle's automatic landing. This paper introduces an overview of the guidance, navigation and control system (GNC), and discusses results of the flight testing.

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