The Cassini spacecraft has been in orbit around Saturn since 2004 and has since been approved for both a first and second extended mission. As hardware reaches and exceeds its documented life expectancy, it becomes vital to closely monitor hardware performance. The performance of the 1-N hydrazine attitude control thrusters is especially important to study, because the spacecraft is currently operating on the back-up thruster branch. Early identification of hardware degradation allows more time to develop mitigation strategies. There is no direct measure of an individual thruster's thrust magnitude, but these values can be estimated by post-processing spacecraft telemetry. This paper develops an algorithm to calculate the individual thrust magnitudes using Euler's equation. The algorithm correctly shows the known degradation in the first thruster branch, validating the approach. Results for the current thruster branch show nominal performance as of August, 2015.


    Access

    Access via TIB

    Check availability in my library


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    Thruster-Specific Force Estimation and Trending of Cassini Hydrazine Thrusters at Saturn


    Contributors:

    Conference:

    AIAA SciTech 2016 ; 2016 ; San Diego, CA, United States


    Publication date :

    2016-01-04


    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    No indication


    Language :

    English






    Thruster-Specific Force Estimation and Trending of Cassini Hydrazine Thrusters at Saturn (AIAA 2016-2087)

    Stupik, Joan / Burk, Thomas A. | British Library Conference Proceedings | 2016


    The Cassini Mission exploring Saturn

    Mitchell, Robert T. | Online Contents | 2008


    The Cassini Mission at Saturn

    Mitchell, R. T. / International Astronautical Federation / International Academy of Astronautics et al. | British Library Conference Proceedings | 2007