James Webb Space Telescope Fuel Slosh Estimation

The mitigation of fuel slosh in microgravity environments is a pressing matter for
the control of both manned and unmanned spacecraft. Recent work has investi-
gated 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 inves-
tigate 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) . Frequency analysis
of the resulting angular velocity residuals did not yield the expected slosh modes.