Abstract
NASA’s ACS3 mission will be the first Earth-bound solar-sail mission to fly so-called calibration steering laws. These steering laws are designed to expose the sailcraft to a variety of dynamical conditions to isolate the effects of different parameters on the dynamics, thereby facilitating the estimation of these parameters. This paper presents the set of candidate calibration steering laws of ACS3, highlighting their operational challenges and impact on the estimation of the sail’s reflectivity and specularity. The results show that, for a conservative GPS position accuracy of 10 m, accurate estimation of the reflectivity and specularity with uncertainties in the order of 10−4 − 10−3 can be achieved by flying any of the proposed calibration laws. However, ACS3’s calibration steering laws were also found to introduce operational challenges that may hinder their implementation for extended periods of time. In particular, the decreased power generation capability of solar arrays was found to be the most severe operational challenge for two out of the five ACS3’s calibration laws analysed.
| Original language | English |
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| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 29th International Symposium on Space Flight Dynamics |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Publication status | Published - 2024 |
| Event | 29th International Symposium on Space Flight Dynamics - Darmstadt, Germany Duration: 22 Apr 2024 → 26 Apr 2024 Conference number: 29 |
Conference
| Conference | 29th International Symposium on Space Flight Dynamics |
|---|---|
| Abbreviated title | ISSFD 2024 |
| Country/Territory | Germany |
| City | Darmstadt |
| Period | 22/04/24 → 26/04/24 |
Bibliographical note
Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-careOtherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.