Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) Mission Attitude Ground System Design

This paper presents an overview of the attitude ground system (AGS) currently under development for the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission. The primary responsibilities for the MMS AGS are definitive attitude determination, validation of the onboard attitude filter, and computation of certain parameters needed to improve maneuver performance. For these purposes, the ground support utilities include attitude and rate estimation for validation of the onboard estimates, sensor calibration, inertia tensor calibration, accelerometer bias estimation, center of mass estimation, and production of a definitive attitude history for use by the science teams. Much of the AGS functionality already exists in utilities used at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center with support heritage from many other missions, but new utilities are being created specifically for the MMS mission, such as for the inertia tensor, accelerometer bias, and center of mass estimation. Algorithms and test results for all the major AGS subsystems are presented here.