Orbital reference frame estimation with power spectral density constraints for drag-free satellites

Abstract The drag-free satellites are widely used in the field of fundamental science as they enable the high-precision measurement in pure gravity fields. This paper investigates the estimation of local orbital reference frame (LORF) for drag-free satellites. An approach, taking account of the combination of the minimum estimation error and power spectral density (PSD) constraint in frequency domain, is proposed. Firstly, the relationship between eigenvalues of estimator and transfer function is built to analyze the suppression and amplification effect on input signals and obtain the eigenvalue range. Secondly, an optimization model for state estimator design with minimum estimation error in time domain and PSD constraint in frequency domain is established. It is solved by the sequential quadratic programming (SQP) algorithm. Finally, the orbital reference frame estimation of low-earth-orbit satellite is taken as an example, and the estimator of minimum variance with PSD constraint is designed and analyzed using the method proposed in this paper.