"Ray S" wrote in
m:

Glad to hear that NASA's DART mission was a near 100% success. Now on
to a full blown autonomous rendezvous and docking demo of two unmanned
NASA spacecraft. Hope NASA can pull this off soon.

The Soviets, of course, pioneered autonomous rendezvous (and docking)
procedures and have used them to support their Salyut and Mir space
stations.

Not quite. The Soviets/Russians use *automated* rendezvous and autonomous
prox ops, while DART is fully autonomous in both rendezvous and prox ops.

The distinction? With the Russian system, prior to Kurs acquisition the
maneuver plan is generated in mission control, and the Russian equivalent
of the FDO uplinks burn solutions to the spacecraft, which dutifully
executes them. The spacecraft has no "big picture" of the overall plan.
Once given a target vector, DART internally generates and executes its own
maneuver plan. The Soviets/Russians have never done anything like that.

--
JRF

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