A method for evaluating attitude and pointing control performance of satellites and onboard instruments of ultra-high precision

As the space technologies are developed, satellite mission requires higher performance on attitude control or pointing control system. Among the requirements from the mission observation that for attitude or pointing stability, especially, is high as the order of sub-arcsecond. In the design phase, the quantitative evaluation on this stability is required to optimize the system design. In this paper, this evaluation methods for pointing performance is summarized. The clearly defined mathematical interface scheme is shown to describe the disturbance torque and force. The concept of the “index” to effectively evaluate the pointing performance is introduced. In the frame of this “index” concept, further the performance evaluation filter is introduced which enables to analyze the influence of disturbance in the frequency domain. The filter is useful to understand the dominant disturbance torque source in the frequency region