Sensor placement for on-orbit modal identification and correlation of large space structures

A method is presented for the selection of a set of sensor locations from a larger candidate set for the purpose of on-orbit identification and correlation of Large Space Structures. The method ranks the candidate sensor locations according to their contribution to the linear independence of the target modal partitions. In an iterative maner, the locations which do not contribute significantly are removed. The final sensor configuration tends to maximize determinant of the corresponding Fisher Information Matrix.