Techniques for Interpreting Fox-1 MEMS Gyro Readings Or Experimenting with an Experiment

摘要

Since the launch of Fox-1A (now AO-85), many of us have been looking at telemetry data coming from the Penn State Erie MEMS Gyro experiment and trying to understand what it means. Unfortunately, between the time of the experiment proposal and Fox-1A's actual launch the students who proposed the experiment have graduated; thus we are on our own. In this paper, I describe some trigonometric concepts and techniques which we can use to help interpret the data from the MEMS experiment, as well as a ground-based experiment I ran in order to confirm these techniques. Note that all Fox-1 satellites (5 total planned) contain the same MEMS gyros so there will be more data to come.