An Adaptive Groundtrack Maintenance Scheme for Spacecraft with Electric Propulsion
This work addresses the practical problem of orbit maintenance for electric propulsion spacecraft, offering an autonomous solution for low Earth orbit missions.
The paper presents an adaptive groundtrack maintenance scheme for spacecraft with electric propulsion, combining a hysteresis controller and a recursive least squares filter to autonomously compensate for atmospheric drag. Numerical simulations of a low Earth orbit mission demonstrate the method's effectiveness.
In this paper, the repeat-groundtrack orbit maintenance problem is addressed for spacecraft driven by electric propulsion. An adaptive solution is proposed, which combines an hysteresis controller and a recursive least squares filter. The controller provides a pulse-width modulated command to the thruster, in compliance with the peculiarities of the electric propulsion technology. The filter takes care of estimating a set of environmental disturbance parameters, from inertial position and velocity measurements. The resulting control scheme is able to compensate for the groundtrack drift due to atmospheric drag, in a fully autonomous manner. A numerical study of a low Earth orbit mission confirms the effectiveness of the proposed method.