meetings - Space Flight Mechanics Committee

hardware. This technique maximizes subsystem performance and provides a design method
to replace traditional, iterative design approaches to sensor placement.
10:45 AAS Sensor Calibration for the MICROSCOPE Satellite Mission
13-482 Hanns Selig, ZARM (Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity),
University of Bremen
The French drag free satellite mission MICROSCOPE(launch in 2017) will perform a test
of the universality of free fall (Equivalence Principle - EP) to an new level of accuracy. The
payload consists of two sensors, each controlling the free fall of a pair of test masses. The
EP test strongly depends on the rejection of disturbances arising from the coupling and
misalignments of the instrument vectorial outputs. Therefore the performance of the
mission depends on the success of the calibration operations which are planned during the
satellite life in orbit, as well as on ground at the ZARM drop tower.
Page 96
23 rd AAS / AIAA Space Flight Mechanics Meeting