2023 Volume 1 Article ID: 10
JAXA is focusing on SLR as a method to grasp the orbit and attitude motion of space debris. If the target object is equipped with an SLR reflector, even after it becomes debris, SLR enables orbit determination with high accuracy and spin rate estimation. Because conventional SLR reflectors are expensive, heavy, and large, we developed a small, lightweight, and inexpensive reflector, named Mt.FUJI, which is demonstrated on the experiment on the HTV-X. While most of the previous studies on attitude motion estimation by SLR have only estimated angular velocity by frequency analysis of SLR data, we propose a method to estimate both attitude and angular velocity using global optimization. Specifically, we construct an evaluation function including a penalty term considering the reflection condition of the reflector and apply a genetic algorithm to search for a solution. Through numerical experiments, it has been found that even when observations are polluted by noise and bias, the proposed method can provide a good solution that can be used as initial values for filter theory and batch processing and without a priori of attitude state. This paper describes the overview of Mt.FUJI and the experiment, the estimation methodology, and the simulation results.
