Impact of launch injection error on orbit-raising of all-electric satellites
Authors
Advisors
Issue Date
Type
Keywords
Citation
Abstract
The effect of launch injection errors on the deployment time and deployed mass of all-electric satellites is investigated in this paper. A stochastic formulation is presented to capture the effect of uncertainties in the initial conditions of the electric orbit-raising problem. Specifically the errors in perigee, apogee and inclination of the injection orbit obtained from launch vehicle user manuals are considered. The stochastic framework is integrated with a fast and robust automated optimizer of low-thrust trajectories in order to propagate the initial condition uncertainties. Monte Carlo simulations are conducted to compute the statistics of transfer time and final deployed mass, by assuming Gaussian distribution for the initial states. The framework is also applicable to large-scale injection errors resulting from a launch vehicle anomaly or failure. Numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate efficacy of the developed concepts.