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Conference Paper
Monitoring of GEO satellite thruster efficiency
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- Authors
- Yoola Hwang, Byoung-Sun Lee
- Issue Date
- 2018-05
- Citation
- International Conference on Space Operations (SpaceOps) 2018, pp.1-10
- Publisher
- AIAA
- Language
- English
- Type
- Conference Paper
- Abstract
- Geostationary-earth-orbiter (GEO) satellites perform station-keeping (SK) maneuver once per week or every other week, which is dependent on the satellite missions. In order to perform SK maneuver, the flight-dynamics-subsystem (FDS) plans amounts of the velocity increments and the firing time, and it reconstructs the planned velocity increments based on the thruster modeling provided by satellite manufacturer. Then parameters related to the maneuver are uploaded to the satellite. However, the maneuver parameters are up to satellite flight software: some upload the firing time and the planned velocity increments and the others transmit the firing time and the reconstructed velocity increments. The satellite executes the command by following flight software mounted on-board. After carrying out the maneuver, the telemetry, related to the each thruster information such as pulse numbers and accumulated on time, is transmitted to the ground. In the ground control center, it calculates fuel usage amounts and estimates the GEO satellite's service lifetime. The thruster efficiency can be calculated and monitored by several methods. First is to conduct the orbit determination (OD) using tracking and ranging data classifying before and after maneuver at the epoch of the firing time. The velocity differences of the OD results by the before and after maneuver at the epoch of the firing time provide the delta velocity due to the maneuver. Second is to estimate the velocity increments at the epoch of the firing impulse time during the OD. Third is to compare the reconstructed velocity increments by thruster modeling and actually calculated velocity increments by fuel accounting (FA). In this paper, we monitor and analyze each thruster efficiency by suggested theoretical methods and estimate the GEO satellite lifetime.
- KSP Keywords
- Firing time, Flight Software, Flight dynamics, GEO satellite, Ground Control, On-board, Pulse number, Satellite mission, Station-keeping, Theoretical methods, control center