Abstract:
NASA’s new SMAP (Soil Moisture Active Passive) spacecraft is a radar and radiometer-
based climate monitoring mission that, for an earth-orbiting satellite,
presented an uncommonly large engineering challenge for the spacecraft designers
at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The primary engineering challenge of
this mission was to design a three-axis stabilized dual-spinning spacecraft with
the largest spinning flexible mesh reflector of any known spacecraft. This paper
reports on the attitude control performance of this duel-spinning conicalscanning
system during the first 18 months of science operations, and provides
an overview of the Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) subsystem performance
for this climate monitoring asset.
