A magnetometer-based orbit determination batch filter has been improved and tested with real flight data from Dynamics Explorer 2 (DE-2), the Magnetic Field Satellite (MAGSAT), and the Orsted satellite. These tests have been conducted to determine the performance of a low-cost autonomous orbit determination system. The spacecraft's orbit, magnetometer biases, and correction terms to the Earth's magnetic field are estimated by this filter. Synthesized sun-sensor data, in addition to real magnetometer data, are used to make the field model correction terms observable. The filter improvements include a new dynamics model and consideration of a priori variances for the field model corrections. The best performance that has been achieved with this filter is a maximum position error of 4.48 km for a 2-day batch of DE-2 data with second-order/degree field model corrections and 2.35 km for a 24-h batch of MAGSAT data with second-order/degree field model corrections. The maximum position error for a 24-h batch of Orsted data is 59.50 km without field model corrections, but is only 2.19 km with 10th-order/degree field model corrections. References: 16
展开▼
