Design and implementation of the flight dynamics system for COMS satellite mission operations

The first Korean multi-mission geostationary Earth orbit satellite, Communications, Ocean, and Meteorological Satellite (COMS) was launched by an Ariane 5 launch vehicle in June 26, 2010. The COMS satellite has three payloads including Ka-band communications, Geostationary Ocean Color Imager, and Meteorological Imager. Although the COMS spacecraft bus is based on the Astrium Eurostar 3000 series, it has only one solar array to the south panel because all of the imaging sensors are located on the north panel. In order to maintain the spacecraft attitude with 5 wheels and 7 thrusters, COMS should perform twice a day wheel off-loading thruster firing operations, which affect on the satellite orbit. COMS flight dynamics system provides the general on-station functions such as orbit determination, orbit prediction, event prediction, station-keeping maneuver planning, station-relocation maneuver planning, and fuel accounting. All orbit related functions in flight dynamics system consider the orbital perturbations due to wheel off-loading operations. There are some specific flight dynamics functions to operate the spacecraft bus such as wheel off-loading management, oscillator updating management, and on-station attitude reacquisition management. In this paper, the design and implementation of the COMS flight dynamics system is presented. An object oriented analysis and design methodology is applied to the flight dynamics system design. Programming language C# within Microsoft .NET framework is used for the implementation of COMS flight dynamics system on Windows based personal computer. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.