Since the MICROSCOPE instrument aims to measure accelerations as low as a few 10−15\,m\,s−2 and cannot operate on ground, it was obvious to have a large time dedicated to its characterization in flight. After its release and first operation, the characterization experiments covered all the aspects of the instrument design in order to consolidate the scientific measurements and the subsequent conclusions drawn from them. Over the course of the mission we validated the servo-control and even updated the PID control laws for each inertial sensor. Thanks to several dedicated experiments and the analysis of the instrument sensitivities, we have been able to identify a number of instrument characteristics such as biases, gold wire and electrostatic stiffnesses, non linearities, couplings and free motion ranges of the test-masses, which may first impact the scientific objective and secondly the analysis of the instrument good operation.
@article{arxiv.2102.11087,
title = {MICROSCOPE instrument in-flight characterization},
author = {Ratana Chhun and Emilie Hardy and Manuel Rodrigues and Pierre Touboul and Gilles Métris and Damien Boulanger and Bruno Christophe and Pascale Danto and Bernard Foulon and Pierre-Yves Guidotti and Phuong-Anh Huynh and Vincent Lebat and Françoise Liorzou and Alain Robert},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.11087},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
This paper is part of set of articles dedicated to the final results of MICROSCOPE space mission and submitted to CQG