Date of Award

Spring 2012

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering

Program/Concentration

Aerospace Engineering

Committee Director

Brett Newman

Committee Member

Robert L. Ash

Committee Member

Colin P. Britcher

Call Number for Print

Special Collections; LD4331.E535 G86 2012

Abstract

In this thesis, time to observation for a generic perturbed low Earth orbit satellite, which is tasked, for reconnaissance of a given surface target is investigated. A curve fitting concept applied to past orbital track data is used to estimate and predict the overflight observation time. The least squares method is selected for the curve fitting process and used for both linear and non-linear aspects. Since orbital track data for actual spacecraft are not widely available, numerical integration of the governing motion equations is used as an alternate data source. One of the numerical integration methods, fourth-order Runge-Kutta, is used to propagate the orbit. Some of the dominant perturbations for low Earth orbit that cause deviations from a normal, idealized orbit motion are considered in the propagation. Additional accelerations caused by perturbations are inserted into the equations of motion numerically by using Runge-Kutta. Five simulation cases are investigated throughout the study. Simulation results show that the curve fitting process decreases the computational time and the methodology can provide accurate estimations for the time to observation.

Rights

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

DOI

10.25777/js2z-sh54

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