Photon Pressure Force on Space Debris TOPEX/Poseidon Measured by Satellite Laser Ranging

Abstract

The (TOPography EXperiment) TOPEX/Poseidon (T/P) altimetry mission operated for 13 years before the satellite was decommissioned in January 2006, becoming a large space debris object at an altitude of 1,340 km. Since the end of the mission, the interaction of T/P with the space environment has driven the satellite's spin dynamics. Satellite laser ranging (SLR) measurements collected from June 2014 to October 2016 allow for the satellite spin axis orientation to be determined with an accuracy of 1.7°. The spin axis coincides with the platform yaw axis (formerly pointing in the nadir direction) about which the body rotates in a counterclockwise direction. The combined photometric and SLR data collected over the 11 year time span indicates that T/P has continuously gained rotational energy at an average rate of 2.87 J/d and spins with a period of 10.73 s as of 19 October 2016. The satellite attitude model shows a variation of the cross‐sectional area in the Sun direction between 8.2 m2 and 34 m2. The direct solar radiation pressure is the main factor responsible for the spin‐up of the body, and the exerted photon force varies from 65 μN to 228 μN around the mean value of 138.6 μN. Including realistic surface force modeling in orbit propagation algorithms will improve the prediction accuracy, giving better conjunction warnings for scenarios like the recent close approach reported by the ILRS Space Debris Study Group—an approximate 400 m flyby between T/P and Jason‐2 on 20 June 2017.

Simulation of the Orbiting Spacecraft to Analysis and Understand Their Rotation Based on Photometry

“…4 the dashed line shows the shift of the longitude (phase) of the PAB vector in this Topex' passage dated 09/12/2018 for the rotation axis with coordinates: right ascension α Ω = 100° and declination δ Ω = 26°. However, this solution for the Topex' rotation pole is significantly different from the value that follows from the pole motion model found in Kucharski (Kucharski et al, 2017). If light reflection, at the moments of these flashes of brightness, was produced by a flat face, then the phase shift of the flashes would be well described by just such model, and the found position of the rotation axis in this passage would correspond to the real one.…”

Ukrainian Database and Atlas of Light Curves of Artificial Space Objects

“…ESA runs the "Debris Attitude Motion Measurements and Modeling" project, led by the Astronomical Institute of the University Bern (AIUB) (Kanzler et al, 2015). The Space Research Institute of Austrian Academy of Sciences (Graz, Austria) in cooperation with Space Environment Research Centre (SERC, Australia) and a number of other centers of Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR) perform a large program to determine the satellites attitude and their spin properties (Kucharski et al, 2017).…”

“…During 2016-2017 the period of rotation of this satellite monotonously decreased with small variations which are typical for objects of space debris. These objects are subjected, for example, to the pressure of solar radiation (Kucharski et al, 2017).…”

Estimating global geodetic parameters using SLR observations to Galileo, GLONASS, BeiDou, GPS, and QZSS

“…Satellite laser ranging (SLR) is the space geodetic technique used for many applications (Pearlman et al 2019), such as the realization of the origin and scale of the International Terrestrial Reference Frames (ITRF, Altamimi et al 2016), determination of global geodetic parameters, such as polar motion and length-of-day (LOD) excess (Pavlis 1994;Sośnica et al 2014;Glaser et al 2015;Bloßfeld et al 2018), determination of low-degree harmonics of the Earth's gravity potential (Cox and Chao 2002;Bloßfeld et al 2015;Sośnica et al 2015a;Cheng and Ries 2017), orbit determination and validation for active satellites and space debris (Arnold et al 2018;Strugarek et al 2019;Kucharski et al 2017), time transfer (Exertier et al 2018), and verification of various general relativity effects (Ciufolini and Pavlis 2004;Pardini et al 2017).…”