The NASA Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3) mission consists of a spacecraft in LEO that carries an 81 m2 solar sail. The spacecraft is planning to be launched in 2024 and the main objective of the mission is to deploy the solar sail to demonstrate its capabilities to effectively change the semi-major axis of its initial 1000 km altitude orbit. Various composite materials were used to produce the sail, together with lightweight booms that will deploy from a 12U CubeSat bus. The ACS3 navigation team at NASA Ames Research Center has built a Flight Dynamics System (FDS) to provide mission navigation and to produce regular ephemeris once on orbit. The FDS can compute the orbit transfers that the spacecraft will perform once the sail is deployed. To achieve that, GPS data is obtained from the spacecraft telemetry and then is used with a Kalman filter and a smoother to obtain an orbit determination solution. The outcome of this process reduces the position and velocity uncertainty in a daily cadence and will be critical for the objective of determining effective semi-major axis change produced by the solar sail. After that, the state vector output is used to feed a propagation model that includes the updated spacecraft attitude and orbit of the spacecraft at the given moment. The trajectory model considers the updated attitude plan of the spacecraft as well as the environmental conditions such as the solar weather to compute the associated drag and solar radiation pressure. This paper covers in detail the implementation of the FDS, as well as the solar sail solar radiation pressure trajectory model.


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    Title :

    Navigation for the ACS3 solar sail mission


    Contributors:

    Conference:

    Small Satellites Systems and Services Symposium (4S 2024) ; 2024 ; Palma de Mallorca, Spain


    Published in:

    Proc. SPIE ; 13546


    Publication date :

    2025-03-20





    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English



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