Proposed Criteria and Control Parameters for Transient Internal Disturbances in Spacecraft

Abstract

Spacecraft internal disturbances are defined as internal forces or torques generated within the spacecraft that produce undesirable movement or behavior of the mission payload and/or the spacecraft. The line-of-sight pointing error of the optical payload caused by internal disturbances is often one of the most critical issues for a satellite with very high payload pointing requirements. The control and management of internal disturbances are, however, not simple, since disturbance forces and torques as well as their transfer characteristics affect the final performance. The transfer characteristics are strongly related to the attitude/structural dynamics, the attitude/pointing control system and the optical properties, and are therefore also affected by the properties of the disturbance itself. Consequently, for a given target performance, the individual disturbance sources must be specified, taking all these factors into consideration. In this paper, it is discussed how to specify transient disturbances, and a set of control parameters is proposed.