Integrated magnetometer–horizon sensor low-earth orbit determination using UKF

Abstract

The estimation of the satellite orbital elements using the integrated magnetometer and horizon sensors data has been investigated in this study. These sensors are generally employed for attitude estimation. The magnetometer and the horizon sensor measure the Earth׳s magnetic field as well as the Earth׳s center direction in the body frame, respectively. The magnitude of the magnetic field and the angle between two vectors have been used for orbit estimation purpose. This excludes the knowledge of the attitude in the orbit determination. The Gaussian variation of parameters equations is used for the orbital motion dynamical model to have the orbital elements as the states of the system. Since the dynamics of the system and the measurement model are nonlinear, the unscented Kalman filter (UKF) is utilized. Moreover, the magnetometer is subjected to scale factor and bias errors and these parameters are also estimated together with the orbital elements. It has been revealed that the UKF-based orbit determination algorithm can determine the sensor error parameters as well as the Keplerian orbital elements. The sensitivity analysis results show that this approach is insensitive to inclination and eccentricity for most orbits and can be adopted for near equatorial as well as near circular orbits.