Satellite dynamics: Modelling, In-Orbit Calibration and Data Processing - Introduction

Abstract

Today we are living in an era of challenging space missions. They will improve our knowledge and understanding of our planet, our solar system, our galaxy and the universe enormously. A very challenging class of missions is aiming at the understanding of the universe and its underlying fundamental principles of physics thus combining astronomy, astrophysics and fundamental physics. But for all these missions the same conditions arise: (a) They are scientifically and technically a new generation of scientific satellites because of an expected improvement of measurement accuracy by several orders of magnitude. (b) The dynamics of the satellite is very closely linked to the scientific measurement instrument. (c) The processing of the measurements needs a long time. Keeping that in mind it becomes clear how challenging these missions are, and the questions arise: How can one make sure that the measurements that are taken today are not affected by undetectable errors which may disturb or even falsify the final result? and How can we prove that spacecraft and instrument which have been developed for these missions will really provide the expected performance? The workshop “Satellite Dynamics: Modelling, In-Orbit Calibration and Data Processing” held from May 21st to May 23rd 2008 in Bremen is one element of the EU-project “First Look”. It showed current developments and methodologies for monitoring scientific data quality, allowed discussions about approaches for scientific quality monitoring, processing techniques and lessons learned.