1 Introduction
2 Satellite Orbit and Performance
Requirements
High precision gravity field mapping promise new in-
sight in solid Earth physics, oceanography, ice sheet
dynamics, geodesy and observation of possible sea level
changes caused by global warming. The European The orbit chosen for this mission is a near-polar sun
Space Agency has planned a satellite dedicated for synchronous circular low Earth orbit with an altitude
this purpose: Gravity field and Ocean Circulation Ex- of 250 km and an inclination i of 96.5”.
plorer (GOCE). The mission depends on accurate com-
pensation of drag effects, referred to as drag-free mo- The low orbit increase influence from gravity anomalies
tion control. The quality of the measurements are ex- on the satellite motion but also cause an increment
pected to yield results with high accuracy: 4 mE for in the disturbance from the environment. In order to
3-dimensional rate of gravity and 1 cm for the geoid be able to accomplish scientific measurements of the
with a spatial resolution of 100 km. The GOCE satel- desired quality the satellite accelerations should be kept
lite is expected to be launched in 2006 [2]. below the specifications in Table 1 and Table 2 [l].
The principal moments of inertia for the satellite are 3.1 Atmospheric drag
considered to coincide with the satellite body axes x, y The acceleration of a satellite in low earth orbit due t o
and z so the inertia tensor becomes a diagonal matrix. atmospheric drag can be written as [5]
Estimated physical parameters for the satellite can be
found in Table 3.
(4)
293
where rcop is the vector from CoM to COP (see Ta-
ble 3). The COP position differs for forces acting on
different spacecraft axes. Hence
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 Due to the position of the COP'Srelative to the CoM,
Time lminl the atmospheric drag causes a restoring torque about
the spacecraft axes y and z.
Figure 1: Atmospheric density through 4 orbits at 250
km altitude
3.2 T h e Earth's Magnetic Field
Interaction between a magnetic moment in the space-
The velocity relative to the atmosphere is a function craft and the Earth's magnetic field causes a torque on
of the absolute velocity of the satellite, V',the angu- the spacecraft
lar velocity of the atmosphere, watm, and the radius NB=mBXB (15)
vector, R, from the Earth center to the satellite.
m B is the magnetic moment of the spacecraft and B is
V;,, = V' - W a t m x R (6) the Earth's magnetic field intensity at the spacecraft's
position. Different models exist for the Earth magnetic
Assuming the angular velocity of the atmosphere as of field and a tilted dipole model, deviating from the Za-
the Earth and taking into account the inclination of direction by 17", has sufficient accuracy [4].This model
the orbit, i, the velocity of the satellite relativeAto the describes the components of the magnetic field as
atmosphere can be expressed as
Vbtm =
V - Rwe cosi
Rwe sin i cos(w0t) ] (7)
B=A-
cos(wot - v m ) sin([,)
Vltm M [ -Rwecosi
V o (8) where
where w e is the angular velocity of the Earth about its
axis [5]. The speed of the spacecraft, V , is derived from 0 A is the rotation matrix from Eq. 11
the gravitation constant of Earth, p e , and the distance 0 me is the Earth magnetic dipole strength.
from the geocenter to the spacecraft as
0 R is the distance from the center of the Earth.
0 wot is the angle from the ascending node to current
spacecraft position.
The approximation in Eq. 8 follows from assuming
0 vm is a phase angle measured from the ascending
V - RUB cos i >> Rwe sin i cos(w0t) (10) node of the orbit relative to the geographic equator
Angular errors should be taken into account when find- to the ascending node of the orbit relative to the
ing the force acting on the satellite. This is done by geomagnetic equator.
applying the following rotation matrix to V;,, tmis the instantaneous inclination of the orbit
A= [ -;1cI
1cI
1
-4
-0
4
1
] (11)
plane to the geomagnetic equator.
294
dv 1 1
_
dt
-- - 2 x~ v + -Fa,,,
m
+ -Fc
m (18)
where N , and F , denote torque and the force supplied
by the propulsion system.
3.4 Gradiometer
For measuring satellite accelerations a gradiometer is
used. This consists of six accelerometers in configura-
tion that each can measure linear accelerations along
three nominally orthogonal axes. From these measure-
ments the satellite accelerations along 6 degrees of free-
dom are derived. The accelerometers are based on elec-
trostatic suspension of proof masses adding second or-
Figure 2: Cold gas thruster configuration der dynamics to the measurements [l]. Measurement
bandwidth is 1 Hz,damping coefficient is 0.7 and the
steady state gain is 1. Gradiometer noise is considered
The thrusters show a second order behaviour with as white noise with the following spectral densities for
a bandwidth of 20 Hz and a damping coefficient of rotational and translational acceleration
0.7. This gives the following relationship between com-
manded and obtained control signal about an axis i
Xth = -176 0
-157911
mz+ 15:1][ (ui,c +vi)
Acceleration along any axis i is thus measured as
Here ~ i is ,the~ commanded control signal, ui is the
obtained control signal and vi is the noise from the Xgm =
-8.8 -39.5
0
] x9m
[ 39d5 ] ai
thrusters. The reason for the non-linearity at low fre- +
quencies in the noise profile for F2/is that the ion ai,m = [o 1 ]Xgn+wi (22)
thruster is canted by an angle of 2.8" with respect to
the y-axis to allow for a redundant ion thruster. There- where ai,m is the measured acceleration, ai is the true
fore a component of the ion thrust is directed towards acceleration and 2ui is the sensor noise with the spectral
y influencing noise profile. density from Eq. 20 or Eq. 21.
295
4 Control System Design
296
To validate control system performance propulsion dy- 5 Conclusions and Further Work
namics is included in the system. It is noted that this
amendment does not affect system stability. Noise with A six-degree-of-freedom model for a satellite in low
the spectral profile shown in Figure 3 is then applied Earth orbit was derived. The model included propul-
and the resulting acceleration noise plotted in Figure 5 sion, measurement systems, environmental distur-
against the requirements. bances from atmospheric drag and the Earth's mag-
netic field. The effects on satellite dynamics were in-
cluded. The satellite itself was considered a rigid body.
'Od 5 Requirements
A continuous-time control system for drag compensa-
tion was designed for the satellite, treating the rota-
tional and translational motions separately.
A setup for F
',I controller synthesis was described and
the designed controllers provided stability and suffi-
cient performance for both control systems. The min-
imum margin was found for translational acceleration
along the x-axis where the noise spectrum reached 25
% of its upper limit [6].
Acknowledgements
fully appreciated.
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References
z -10
297