The expansion of satellite constellation applications brings attention to the need for responsive, reliable satellite communication. For preflight technology assessment of missions, a simulation of two spacecraft in low Earth orbit has been created to estimate clock synchronization and precision orbit determination based on measured instrumentation performance. A novel MATLAB-based numerical simulator was developed to model spacecraft-to-spacecraft laser time-transfer and estimate the offset between the spacecraft clocks over time. This simulation includes timing errors associated with laser pulse detection, as well as non-Gaussian clock drift models. Two on-board clocks are modeled: a cesium-based chip-scale atomic clock and a rubidium-based miniature atomic clock. The positions and velocities of the spacecraft at a reference epoch and the constant coefficients of a polynomial clock model are estimated. Results compare the estimated clock model of a mission operation that only uses GPS measurements and one that uses both GPS and laser pulse time-of-flight measurements between spacecraft referenced to their on-board clocks. Including lasing measurements reduces the root-mean-square clock model error to approximately 80% of the RMS of the cases with only GPS measurements. This simulation tool can be used to optimize the lasing operations schedule based on mission timing performance objectives.


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    Title :

    Pulsed Laser Links Simulation for Small Satellite Clock Model Estimation



    Published in:

    Publication date :

    2025-03-01




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English




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