Smart-1 Moon Impact Operations

You are here: Homepage > Search

Smart-1 Moon Impact Operations

Ayala, Andres / Rigger, Ralf

This paper describes the operations to control the Moon impact of the 3-axis stabilized spacecraft SMART-1 in September 2006. SMART-1 was launched on 27/09/2003. It was the first ESA mission to use an Electric Propulsion (EP) engine as the main motor to spiral out of the Earth gravity field and reach a scientific moon orbit [1]. During September 2005 the last EP maneuvers were performed using the remaining Xenon, in order to compensate for the 3rd body perturbations of the Sun and Earth. These operations extended the mission for an additional year. Afterwards the EP performance became unpredictable and low, so that no meaningful operation for the moon impact could be done. To move the predicted impact point on the 16/8/2006 into visibility from Earth an alternative Delta-V strategy was designed. Due to their alignment, the attitude thrusters could not be used directly to generate the Delta-V, so this strategy was based on controlled angular momentum biasing. Firing along the velocity vector around apolune, the remaining Hydrazine left from the attitude control budget was used, to shift the impact to the required coordinates.