Tests of magnetometer/sun-sensor orbit determination using flight data

Mark Psiaki, Hee Jung
2001 AIAA Guidance, Navigation, and Control Conference and Exhibit   unpublished
A magnetometer-based orbit determination batch filter has been improved and tested with real flight data from Dynamics Explorer 2 (DE-2), the Magnetic Field Satellite (MAGSAT), and the Ørsted satellite. These tests have been conducted in order to determine the performance of a low-cost autonomous orbit determination system. The spacecraft's orbit, magnetometer biases, and correction terms to the Earth's magnetic field are estimated by this filter. Synthesized sunsensor data in addition to real
more » ... agnetometer data is used in order to make the field model correction terms observable. The filter improvements include a new dynamics model and consideration of a priori variances for the field model corrections. The best performance that has been achieved with this filter is a maximum position error of 4.48 km for a 2-day batch of DE-2 data with 2 nd order/degree field model corrections and 2.35 km for a 24-hour batch of MAGSAT data with 2 nd order/degree field model corrections. The maximum position error for a 24-hour batch of Ørsted data is 59.50 km without field model corrections, but is only 2.19 km with 10 th order/degree field model corrections.
doi:10.2514/6.2001-4428 fatcat:m7ltkkgr4ff27os4pu3hr2eqsm