James Webb Space Telescope Fuel Slosh Estimation

Thi-han W Nge; Matthew M Wittal; Carl Hansen; Peter Gauthier

NASA NTRS · 20250000401

James Webb Space Telescope Fuel Slosh Estimation

Thi-han W Nge·Matthew M Wittal·Carl Hansen·Peter Gauthier

Abstract

The mitigation of fuel slosh in microgravity environments is a pressing matter for the control of both manned and unmanned spacecraft. Recent work has investigated negative mass modeling of fuel slosh using Lie Group SE(3) . This paper applies Lie group SE(3) to the full body problem of spacecraft dynamics to investigate attitude perturbations caused by fuel slosh aboard the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). We develop a dynamical model to parse these perturbations from slew telemetry data via residuals analysis. This model uses a novel, N-body Runge-Kutta integrator in the special Euclidean group SE(3). The enhanced ability to validate fuel slosh models reduces settling time after slew operations and, accordingly, maximizes available science time.

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BibTeX RIS

Thi-han W Nge, Matthew M Wittal, Carl Hansen, Peter Gauthier. James Webb Space Telescope Fuel Slosh Estimation. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20250000401

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