An Adaptive Groundtrack Maintenance Scheme for Spacecraft with Electric Propulsion

TL;DR

This paper presents an adaptive control scheme for spacecraft with electric propulsion that autonomously maintains groundtrack by estimating disturbances and adjusting thruster commands, demonstrated through numerical simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel adaptive control approach combining hysteresis control and recursive least squares filtering for electric propulsion orbit maintenance.

Findings

Effective groundtrack drift compensation demonstrated in simulations

Autonomous disturbance estimation improves control accuracy

Applicable to low Earth orbit missions with electric propulsion

Abstract

In this paper, the repeat-groundtrack orbit maintenance problem is addressed for spacecraft driven by electric propulsion. An adaptive solution is proposed, which combines an hysteresis controller and a recursive least squares filter. The controller provides a pulse-width modulated command to the thruster, in compliance with the peculiarities of the electric propulsion technology. The filter takes care of estimating a set of environmental disturbance parameters, from inertial position and velocity measurements. The resulting control scheme is able to compensate for the groundtrack drift due to atmospheric drag, in a fully autonomous manner. A numerical study of a low Earth orbit mission confirms the effectiveness of the proposed method.