ICESat consisted of the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) and a commercial spacecraft bus. The stability of the GLAS to bus alignment was unknown and significant for GLAS pointing. Pointing control was performed by the bus, and variations of the GLAS alignment were effectively pointing control errors. There were four star trackers making measurements sensitive to this alignment, two on GLAS and two on the bus. Tracker pointing variations during samples from seven years of flight data were estimated using an alignment filter. The states of an alignment filter represent multiple independent attitudes, enabling the fusion of measurements from an arbitrary number of trackers and gyro units. The ICESat alignment filter states were equivalent to four tracker pointing vectors, expressed in both the body and celestial frames. Together with a star catalog, the four pointing vectors were equivalent to predictions of the tracker measurements. The stars provided nearly ideal reference points, but filter performance was improved by detecting and handling deterministic star errors. The primary result was evidence for relatively large pointing variations of the two GLAS trackers, on the order of fifty arcseconds, with both periodic orbital variations and trends on long time scales. There was also evidence of correlations between the variations of the two GLAS trackers, suggesting that they reflected GLAS to bus alignment variations. / text
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UTEXAS/oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/19483 |
| Date | 15 February 2013 |
| Creators | Smith, Noah Harold |
| Source Sets | University of Texas |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | application/pdf |
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