On-board and/or ground-based gyroless accelerometer calibration with uncertain spacecraft inertia for NASA´s Magnetospheric MultiScale (MMS) Mission

Several methods are presented for the on-board and/or ground-based calibration of accelerometers for the spacecraft (s/c) of the NASA Magnetospheric MultiScale (MMS) Mission during mission operation. It is shown that a single lumped bias (represented by 3 parameters) is sufficient to represent all nine accelerometer calibration parameters for sensor bias, orthogonal misalignment and shift in accelerometer position with respect to the s/c center of mass. Dynamic filters/observers are shown to fail if not provided an accurate inertia tensor for estimation. A batch process filter calibration technique is applied to estimate s/c states and is robust against parametric (s/c inertia) uncertainties. Analytical simulations show that the batch method is able to correct accelerometer readings to within 1 micro-g of true acceleration. Preliminary experimental results show qualitative supporting trends for the batch calibration method.