Modeling and Identifying the Acceleration Imposed on Maneuvering Spacecraft

In consideration of maneuvering spacecraft, the uncertainty of thrust acceleration will cause enormous error to model and track the accelerating motion, it´s reasonable to think that the measurements mainly reflect the uncertainty of the thrust acceleration. This paper focuses on modeling and building on-line filter to identify the continuous thrust acceleration to compensate the uncertainty of the force model during the maneuver process, an elegant differential equation is derived for variable acceleration, an extended Kalman filter (EKF) is developed for dynamic system to identify forwardly the variable acceleration in real time, also the variational equation for the measurement vector to acceleration is put forward to linearise the discrete-time measurement equations. The mission flight scenery shows the algorithm developed here can estimate the acceleration and determine the orbital parameters precisely during the continuous thrust maneuver process.