Design and Analysis of Manoeuvre Scenarios for Highly Agile Satellites
Abstract: The new generation of agile Earth observation satellites provide much higher observation capabilities than their non-agile predecessors. From a kinematic point of view, these capabilities result in more complex guidance laws for the spacecrafts attitude control system.
The computation of these guidance laws is driven by a number of factors. For instance, the Earths curved shape and its rotation in combination with the possible scan path geometries leads to a highly nonlinear relation between the motion of the satellite and the line-of-sight projection onto the Earth.
In this paper ASSET (Agile Satellites Scenario Evaluation Tool), a modular MATLAB® command line tool that allows designing and analysing complex ground scan scenarios for agile satellites carrying time delayed integration instruments, is presented. Each single scenario may consist of one or several ground scans, linked by suitable spacecraft slews.
Once the entire scenario is defined, ASSET will analyse whether the kinematic and dynamic constraints of a specific satellite allow to perform this scenario and will then generate the related guidance profile (angles and angular rates). The satellites’ ground track, the projection of the instruments line-of-sight and the projection of the instruments field of view on earth can be plotted for a visual inspection.
ASSET is ready to use for the analysis of scenarios with several different scan modes usually performed by such type of satellites.
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