Fault diagnosis of spacecraft reaction wheels based on principal component analysis

This paper presents a fault diagnosis system of the chaser reaction wheels used during the rendezvous phase of the Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission. The principal component analysis has been adopted to estimate the relationships between the various variables of the process. To ensure the feasibility of the proposed FDI approach, a set of data provided by an industrial “high-fidelity” simulator of the MSR and representing the rotation rates of the spacecraft reaction wheels has been considered. The test results demonstrate that the fault detection and isolation are successfully accomplished.