Aas 12-198 Dual Accelerometer Usage Strategy for Onboard Space Navigation

In the presence of significant and consistent non-gravitational accelerations, accelerometer measurements are often used in lieu of analytical expressions to propagate the state of aerospace vehicles in model-based estimation algorithms such as the Kalman filter [1, 2]. In space applications, accelerometers are often used to propagate the state of the vehicle through a translational maneuver, or “burn”. At all other times non-gravitational forces are usually much smaller than the accuracy of most commercially available accelerometers, therefore space vehicles commonly threshold the acceleromter, i.e. they use it only when the measurements are above a predetermined value [3]. The Space Shuttle rendezvous and proximity operations program (RPOP), for example, employs this strategy [4].