6th International Conference on Astrodynamics Tools and Techniques (ICATT)

First results of IOTA (In-Orbit Tumbling Analysis)

16 Mar 2016, 16:20

20m

3.02 Hassium (Darmstadtium)

Oral presentation at the conference 13: Orbit Determination and Prediction Techniques Orbit Determination and Prediction Techniques (II)

Speaker

Mr Patrik Kärräng (Hyperschall Technologie Göttingen (HTG))

Description

Estimating and predicting the tumbling motion of orbital debris is not an easy task. While in orbit an object experiences perturbations due to external forces in the near-Earth environment. This changes the object’s orbit and attitude over time. There are observational techniques that are being used to determine the spin rate of orbital debris such as light curve observation, satellite laser ranging and radar measurements. It is difficult to determine the true attitude motion without combining the results from the observations and comparing them with a model. IOTA is a prototype software developed under ESA's "Debris Attitude Motion Measurements and Modelling" project by Hyperschall Technologie Göttingen (HTG) to address this issue. The software will provide short-, medium-, and long-term propagation of orbit and attitude motion (six degrees-of-freedom), taking into account all the relevant forces and torques acting on satellites and space debris. External influences included are gravitational forces from the Sun-Earth-Moon system, aerodynamic drag, solar radiation pressure, eddy current damping and momentum transfer from micrometeroid impacts as well as internal influences such as reaction wheel behaviour, tank sloshing, magnetic torquer activity and thurster firing. Post-processing of the simulated result will enable generation of synthetic measurements of observation. Combining and comparing the observational with the simulated results increases the accuracy of the attitude motion determination and will lead to better understanding of the attitude evolution. The software is still under development. In this paper the software implementation of the environmental influences and propagation of the state vector will be discussed and preliminary results with of the attitude motion of ENVISAT have been simulated to provide an example of the capabilities of IOTA.