Abstract: Based on rendezvous mission and flight characteristics, a rendezvous orbit consists of three basic flight segments, i.e., orbital maneuver, free flight and midcourse velocity correction. The propagation laws of state errors and effects of errors on the accuracy of the rendezvous and docking (R&D) mission were studied with a linear covariance analysis method and Monte Carlo simulations. In the orbital maneuver segment, effects on the state error propagation caused by attitude errors, control system performance, state estimation errors of the chasing spacecraft, and orbit perturbation of the target spacecraft were studied. In the free flight segment, effects on the state error propagation caused by prior state estimation errors and orbit determination errors of the chasing spacecraft were studied. And in the midcourse velocity correction segment, effects on the state error propagation caused by attitude errors and control system performance of the chasing satellite  were studied. The results of the Monte Carlo simulations show that the proposed error analysis  method is properly designed and can be applied to the R&D orbit design and error analysis so as to validate the R&D strategy.

Key words: Rendezvous and docking, Error analysis, Covariance, Monte Carlo simulation, Spacecraft