A customer recently asked us for help comparing the disturbance analysis available in the CubeSat Toolbox with the full model in SCT Professional, for a 3U CubeSat. That is, to compare CubeSatDisturbanceAnalysis to Disturbances. The CubeSat Toolbox uses a simplified model of the spacecraft geometry as a single set of fixed areas, nominally for a rectangular prism. The full model in SCT Pro allows for articulated and rotating bodies built of individual components. The CubeSat Toolbox has a subset of the environment and disturbance functions in Pro but includes drag and optical disturbances in Earth orbit. Given enough options for the two models it should be possible to get the exact same results. We will sketch out our process and discoveries in this post.

Creating a model of a 3U CubeSat in Pro was the easy part, as it is just a single box component, and verifying that the areas match those from CubeSatFaces is accomplished by a trivial command-line printout. Comparing the results of the optical and drag analysis is much more complex as there are so many variables:

• Atmosphere model: exponential, scale height, J70
• Solar flux model
• Earth albedo model
• Earth radiation model
• Satellite optical properties (specular, diffuse, absorptive)
• Attitude pointing (LVLH vs. ECI)

In order to compare the results, we had to call both disturbance models in a script and generate plots overlaying the resulting forces and torques. Here is the code defining the model for SCT Pro.

m = CreateComponent( 'make', 'box', 'x', 0.1, 'y', 0.1, 'z', 0.3,...
'name', 'Core', 'body', 1, 'mass', mass, ...
'faceColor', 'gold foil', 'emissivity', thermal.emissivity,...
'absorptivity', thermal.absorptivity, 'sigmaT', optical.sigmaT,...
'sigmaA', optical.sigmaA, 'sigmaD', optical.sigmaD, 'sigmaS', optical.sigmaS,...
'inside', 0);
BuildCADModel( 'add component', m );


You can see the thermal and optical properties that must be specified as well as the mass and dimensions. The spacecraft is inertially fixed and put into an equatorial orbit, so we would expect zero drag along the z axis and the x/y forces to oscillate at orbit rate. Then to call the disturbance model we generate a low Earth orbit, get the Earth environment and run the analysis, like so:

[r,v] = RVOrbGen(el,t);
e = EarthEnvironment( r, v, jD, d );
hD = Disturbances( 'init', g, e );
[fD,tD] = Disturbances( 'run', g, e, hD );


The EarthEnvironment function is where the guts of the space environment modeling occurs. This includes specifying albedo and radiation constants, calculating the atmospheric density over the orbit, computing the sun vector and solar flux magnitude, checking for eclipses, computing the Earth magnetic field, and correcting the inertial velocity for the rotation of the atmosphere for drag calculations. In the CubeSat toolbox, this data is computed inside the dynamical model, RHSCubeSat. The same steps of creating the model and calling the disturbance function are shown below.

c = RHSCubeSat;
c.mass = 3;
c.inertia = InertiaCubeSat( '3U', c.mass );
[a,n,rho] = CubeSatFaces('3U',1);
c.surfData.nFace = n;
c.surfData.area = a;
c.surfData.rFace = rho;
for k = 1:6
% Radiation coefficients [absorbed; specular; diffuse]
c.surfData.sigma(:,k) = [optical.sigmaA;optical.sigmaS;optical.sigmaD];
end
c.atm = [];
q = QZero*ones(1,size(r,2));
[tC, fC, h, hECI, fr, tq] = CubeSatDisturbanceAnalysis( c, q, r, v, jD );


Let’s look at drag first, as it proved to be the easiest to verify. The primary difference between the CubeSat model and full disturbance model for drag initially was the atmosphere model itself: CubeSat uses the Jacchia 1970 model by default, while EarthEnvironment specifies a scale height atmosphere. The Jacchia 1970 model accounts for changes in density with the time of day, resulting in an orbit rate periodicity; however it is computationally more intensive and not needed in preliminary analysis. The scale heights model depends only on altitude and is very quick. The CubeSat dynamic model already had an option to switch to the scale height atmosphere if desired, so we added that same option to the CubeSat disturbance analysis function. This promptly resulted in a close result between the models for the drag force.

Comparison of the drag force between the CubeSat Toolbox and SCT Pro disturbance models for a 3U CubeSat

A slight variation remains due to a difference in the transformation between the inertial frame and Earth-fixed frame between the two models. This transformation is used to account for the rotation of Earth’s atmosphere, as drag depends on the relative velocity between the surface and the air. CubeSat uses a fast almanac function, ECIToEF, to compute this matrix for a given Julian date. This model accounts for nutation but not as accurately as TruEarth does in Pro. The EarthEnvironment function in Pro, however, uses a simpler transformation using Earth’s rotational rate about the inertial z-axis, ignoring nutation. This accounts for the nonzero Z force in the CubeSat output, which can be seen to be four orders of magnitude less than the X/Y forces. Both approaches are valid for a preliminary analysis so we accept this small remaining difference.

Producing an equally close comparison for the optical forces unearthed a few bugs in the CubeSat version as well as differences in fidelity that are intentional. First, recall that there are three main contributions to optical forces in Earth orbit: solar flux; Earth albedo – that is, reflected flux; and Earth infrared radiation. The fluxes can be modeled simply as constants, or at higher fidelity by accounting for distance from the radiating body. The full disturbance model accounts for the change in solar flux over the year as the Earth moves in its orbit, which amounts to about 100 W/m2 or 7% of the average flux. The CubeSat environment model was not doing this, but since it was already calling the sun vector function which calculates the needed data, we decided to add it. The sun vector itself can be modeled a number of ways, with CubeSat providing a low fidelity almanac version and Pro a higher fidelity almanac option as well as an option for JPL ephemerides.

Making a temporary change in CubeSat to use the higher fidelity sun almanac provided closer results, but there were still differences in the optical forces. A check on the optical coefficients revealed that Disturbances assumed 100% diffuse reflection for planetary infrared radiation while the CubeSat version assumed 100% absorption. This was result of a misunderstanding of the model when the CubeSat version was created. The intention of the model is to assume 100% absorption, but the radiation has to be reemitted or the temperature of the body would increase to infinity. Hence the diffuse coefficient in the Pro model. So, the CubeSat version’s coefficients were corrected to match. This improved the agreement between the models but still not completely.

Further investigation uncovered a bug in the calculation of the planetary radiation flux and Earth albedo flux. We call this a copy/paste bug, as the distance scaling factor was in the code, but applied to the wrong variable when the CubeSat version was created from the Pro version – so the scaling was unitized out. Correctly applying the scale factor to the flux input (and not its unit vector) to the base solar force function, SolarF, resulted in exact agreement between the two models. The figure below shows the final differences with the CubeSat sun almanac function restored to its default value.

Comparison of the optical force between the simplified and full disturbance models for a 3U CubeSat

To summarize, we identified the following subtleties in making a direct comparison between these two disturbance models:

• Selecting the same atmosphere model, AtmDens2, for both cases
• Understanding the sun vector model in each case (SunV1 vs. SunV2)
• Adding the solar flux scaling with the Earth’s distance from the sun to the CubeSat model (1 line)
• Updating the optical coefficients for planetary radiation in the CubeSat model (to be diffuse)
• Correcting a bug in the scaling of the Earth albedo and radiation fluxes with altitude in CubeSat
• Accounting for Earth’s nutation in transforming velocity to the Earth-fixed frame

This provides a great illustration of how careful one needs to be in performing any disturbance analysis, as there are so many subleties in even simple models that must be recorded if results are to be replicated. Every constant, every scale factor, every coefficient, every source of ephemeris needs to be understood.

We were happy to provide the results of our analysis to our customer so that he could decide which models he wants to use in his analysis. This is an example of the technical support we can provide to all our SCT customers; if you have a question, just ask!