The pitch and yaw attitude control thrusters of the Magellan spacecraft generate uncoupled moments about the spacecraft center of mass, perturbing the spacecraft's orbit. A strategy to model these perturbing forces in the spacecraft equations of motion is presented. This strategy can model the thruster forces occurring in the nominal and contingency modes of attitude control operation. In the nominal mode, the thrusters fire only to balance the daily unloading of the momentum wheels. The contingency case will occur if a pitch or yaw axis momentum wheel fails, and the thrusters could fire up to 1200 times around the orbit to replace the failed wheel's momentum contribution. Deterministic errors are computed and shown to be under specified error requirements.


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    Title :

    Deterministic errors in the Magellan orbit due to attitude control thruster activity


    Contributors:

    Publication date :

    1989-01-01


    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    No indication


    Language :

    English


    Keywords :



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