Estimation of Interplanetary Magnetic Field for attitude control of small spacecraft in deep space missions

摘要

In recent years, interplanetary space missions using nano-spacecraft have been introduced. However, due to its limitation,traditional attitude methods cannot be used in nano-spacecraft. In order to handle this problem, a new method of attitudecontrol using torque generated from magnetic torquer (MTQ) and Interplanetary Magnetic Field (IMF) was introduced.This method, however, depend heavily on getting the information of the IMF, which is very difficult to obtain usingmagnetic sensor. In this paper, a new method to obtain the IMF information using actuator is introduced. The method isfirst tested using Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) under ideal environment and then improved to work under environmentwith disturbance using Adaptive Unscented Kalman Filter (AUKF). In conclusion, by using the proposed method it ispossible to estimate the IMF at 0.1 nT order error even under solar disturbance while performing attitude control.