Best-Fit Conic Approximation of Spacecraft Trajectory

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Tuesday, November 01 2005 A computer program calculates a best conic fit of a given spacecraft trajectory. Spacecraft trajectories are often propagated as conics onboard. The conic-section parameters as a result of the bestconic- fit are uplinked to computers aboard the spacecraft for use in updating predictions of the spacecraft trajectory for operational purposes. In the initial application for which this program was written, there is a requirement to fit a single conic section (necessitated by onboard memory constraints) accurate within 200 microradians to a sequence of positions measured over a 4.7-hour interval. The present program supplants a prior one that could not cover the interval with fewer than four successive conic sections. The present program is based on formulating the best-fit conic problem as a parameter-optimization problem and solving the problem numerically, on the ground, by use of a modified steepest-descent algorithm. For the purpose of this algorithm, optimization is defined as minimization of the maximum directional propagation error across the fit interval. In the specific initial application, the program generates a single 4.7-hour conic, the directional propagation of which is accurate to within 34 microradians easily exceeding the mission constraints by a wide margin.

This program was written by Gurkipal Singh of Caltech for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. For further information, access the Technical Support Package (TSP) free on-line at www.techbriefs.com/tsp under the Software category.

This software is available for commercial licensing. Please contact Karina Edmonds of the California Institute of Technology at (818) 393- 2827. Refer to NPO-40622.