An Adaptive Groundtrack Maintenance Scheme for Spacecraft with Electric Propulsion
Systems and Control
2021-01-22 v2
Abstract
In this paper, the repeat-groundtrack orbit maintenance problem is addressed for spacecraft driven by electric propulsion. An adaptive solution is proposed, which combines an hysteresis controller and a recursive least squares filter. The controller provides a pulse-width modulated command to the thruster, in compliance with the peculiarities of the electric propulsion technology. The filter takes care of estimating a set of environmental disturbance parameters, from inertial position and velocity measurements. The resulting control scheme is able to compensate for the groundtrack drift due to atmospheric drag, in a fully autonomous manner. A numerical study of a low Earth orbit mission confirms the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1807.08109,
title = {An Adaptive Groundtrack Maintenance Scheme for Spacecraft with Electric Propulsion},
author = {Mirko Leomanni and Andrea Garulli and Antonio Giannitrapani and Fabrizio Scortecci},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1807.08109},
year = {2021}
}