Author(s): SUN Zhao-Wei, ZHONG Wei-Chao, ZHANG Shi-Jie, ZHANG Jian, Research Center of Satellite Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology
Pages: 1722-1728
Year: 2013 Issue:  10
Journal: Acta Automatica Sinica
Keyword:  Mean orbital elements; atmospheric drag; zonal harmonics; unscented Kalman filter(UKF); Monte Carlo;
Abstract: To solve the problem of mean orbital elements calculation for long-term autonomous missions, a filter estimation method is used to estimate the mean orbital elements with the efects of atmospheric drag and the gravitational potential of zonal harmonics. The efects of atmospheric drag are analyzed by virtue of analytical orbital mechanics with the spherical exponential model of atmospheric density. The general formulas are derived for the rates of change of mean orbital elements perturbed by gravitational potential zonal harmonics. The state equations and measurement equations are established to treat the mean orbital elements as state variables and the osculating orbital elements as measurements.The distribution of the measurement noise is analyzed. In this estimator, the spherical simplex sigma-point selection and the square root form of unscented Kalman filter(UKF) are fused for less computational cost and better numerical stability on-board. Numerical simulations are performed to demonstrate the viability of the proposed method. Comparison with another approach shows that the proposed one can estimate mean orbital elements on-board for a real-time and long-term mission and can ofer a higher accuracy.