Abstract
The determination of physical parameters of celestial bodies provides critical navigational and scientific information. Determining the mass, rotation state, and density distribution is an important task of the navigation team on an operational mission. One representation of the internal density distribution, spherical harmonics, may be leveraged to compute the orientation of the principal-axis frame of the celestial body, which in turn informs the dynamics of the body’s motion. Particularly, the moments of inertia uniquely determine the second-degree spherical harmonic coefficients. Using data from NASA’s Dawn mission to the massive asteroids Ceres and Vesta, a method is proposed that refines the knowledge of the principal-axis frame by using estimated spherical harmonic coefficients. Applying an iterative rotation scheme to the solved-for body-fixed frame leads to convergence on the dynamical principal-axis frame.
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