MAGNETOSPHERIC MULTI-SCALE MISSION'S ORBIT PROPAGATION SENSITIVITY TO NAVIGATION ERRORS

The objective of this paper is to address a need for onboard navigation solutions to propagate accurately, in the context of a formation of satellites in highly elliptical orbits that will study magnetic reconnection. The onboard navigation function is not intended to perform state prediction; rather, it produces definitive states that ground operators will use to generate flight dynamics and science products. Many of these products, such as maneuver plans, conjunction predictions, and tracking acquisition plans, require predictive states. In particular, the paper examines relationships between predictive navigation accuracy and the time between previously unscheduled maneuvers. Planning for such maneuvers, which are needed for formation maintenance and collision avoidance, should accommodate a trade between false alarms and missed detections, and must also meet operational constraints on maneuver frequency. The paper shows how these trades relate to secular growth in the achieved formation states and predictive navigation errors. These relationships refine previous results by including the effect of Earth's oblateness on secular growth of knowledge and execution errors.