Orbit Determination Methods for Space Missions and Applications to the Exploration of the Solar System

Dear Colleagues,

Space missions are an extraordinary opportunity to collect data in proximity to celestial bodies, whether large, such as planets and satellites, or small, such as asteroids and comets. The payload of a mission includes different instruments and experiments, with which it is possible to investigate many features of target celestial bodies. 

Among these, radio science experiments make use of the radio link with Earth to perform very precise orbit determination of the spacecraft. Often, the standard onboard radio subsystem is augmented by dedicated instrumentation, such as Ultra Stable Oscillators or Ka-band transponders, or different types of data, such as accelerometers, laser altimeters, or pictures taken by optical cameras. In this framework, space missions’ data have been proved crucial to study the gravity, rotation, and atmosphere of celestial bodies. Moreover, they are routinely used to improve ephemerides, also allowing to measure small dynamical effects that affect the long-term evolution of celestial bodies. In order to obtain these fundamental results for a full understanding of the solar system, space missions are preceded by a development phase for determining scientific objectives and resolving engineering challenges. In this context, preliminary simulations and covariance analyses are essential to investigate new mission concepts and to assess the performances of future missions. 

This Special Issue aims to cover innovative technologies, methods, and applications of precise orbit determination using space mission data. Relevant topics include but are not limited to: 

• New orbit determination strategies;
• Software products for precise orbit determination;
• Development of dedicated hardware and instrumentation;
• Estimation of the gravity field of planets and small bodies;
• Estimation of the rotation and precession of celestial bodies;
• Detection of dynamical effects affecting the orbital evolution of celestial bodies;
• Test of the General Relativity theory;
• Use of nanosatellites for in situ observations;
• Synergic use of different onboard instruments;
• New mission concepts for solar system exploration.

Dr. Giacomo Lari
Dr. Marco Zannoni
Guest Editors

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• orbit determination
• radio science
• spacecraft data
• small satellites
• planetary science
• satellite geodesy
• ephemerides

Title: Geomagnetic Field Measurements based Adaptive Cubature H-infinity Filter for Microsatellite Autonomous Orbit Estimation
Authors: Zhaoming Li; Xinyan Yang; Lei Li; Yurong Liao
Affiliation: Department of Electronic and Optical Engineering, Space Engineering University, Beijing 101416, China
Abstract: To address the issue of reduced orbit estimation accuracy resulting from discrepancies between in-orbit measured geomagnetic field values and IGRF model values in autonomous orbit estimation of microsatellites based on geomagnetic field measurements, this study introduces an adaptive cubature H-infinity filtering algorithm. Firstly, it presents the low-altitude orbital dynamics model and geomagnetic field measurement model for microsatellites. Subsequently, within the adaptive cubature H-infinity filtering algorithm, a spherical simplex rule and a second-order Gaussian-Legendre quadrature criterion are employed to compute the spherical surface integral and radial integral. Additionally, a spherical simplex-radial quadrature rule is proposed to enhance the approximation accuracy of nonlinear Gaussian weighted integrals. Furthermore, by integrating extended H-infinity filtering based on game theory with the cubature quadrature rule, an inverse proportional relationship between constraint level and filtering innovation is established. This allows for adaptive adjustment of the constraint level to enhance robustness against model errors. Finally, through semi-physical simulation experiments, it is demonstrated that compared with traditional algorithms, the proposed algorithm improves autonomous orbit estimation position accuracy of microsatellites by 7.49%, while also enhancing velocity accuracy by 3.1%, thus validating its effectiveness.