Daniel Estévez

A month ago, I wrote a post showing the evolution of Tianwen-1‘s attitude so far during its transfer orbit to Mars. For most of the mission, the spacecraft has maintained a fixed attitude where the spacecraft body Y axis was held orthogonal to the planed formed by the spacecraft, Earth and Sun, and the spacecraft to Sun vector had a constant angle of -20 degrees with the spacecraft body X axis.

The figure below shows how the spacecraft axes are labelled. Note the solar panels along the Y axis, the thruster on the -X face, and the high gain antenna on the -Z face.

Yesterday, on 2020-10-22, the spacecraft made an attitude change. The angle between the Sun vector and the X axis was changed back to 0 degrees, which was the angle maintained during the first days of the mission. This can be seen clearly in the figure below.

The angle between the Earth vector and the -Z axis (where the high gain antenna is located) is more interesting, as it gives the slew angle of the antenna. Throughout most of the mission, it was growing and I kept wondering if an attitude change would be done to prevent the antenna from running out of slew range. However, at some point the angle started decreasing. This is basically caused by the Earth “overtaking” Tianwen-1, since the Earth’s orbit is faster (you can see some pictures of this in the last slides of my talk in the AMSAT-UK colloquium).

In this graph we see that the change in attitude also causes a sudden increase of 20 degrees in this angle, so now it is 70 degrees. This shows that the possible slew range for the high gain antenna is much larger than I had initially thought. Perhaps it is not so surprising after we have seen the cut-out in the dish in the in-orbit images published on October 1.

If we zoom in to the last few days, we see that the change in attitude happened at some time when the spacecraft was not in view from Europe, so unfortunately we don’t have any telemetry of the change itself.

I’m not sure of the reason why this attitude change has been done now. It will be interesting to see if the attitude continues with this new 0 degree angle or it switches back to the previous -20 degree angle.

Thanks to AMSAT-DL‘s team at Bochum for continuing the daily collection of telemetry with the 20m antenna. Their effort makes it possible to detect events like this with short notice. The data and code to produce the plots in this post can be found in this Jupyter notebook.

A few days ago I spoke about the deep space manoeuvre that Tianwen-1 had executed on 2020-10-09. As remarked in that post, the data we had from that manoeuvre came from extrapolating state vectors from before and after the burn. The state vectors that the spacecraft was broadcasting after the burn most likely came from a prediction rather than from the actual result of the burn. In a few days, we would see a small change in the trajectory as the Chinese DSN performed precise orbit determination and uploaded the results to the spacecraft.

In fact, we saw that change the next day. The figure below is generated in the following way. I have taken the first state vector that we have received after the burn, and propagated its trajectory in GMAT. Then I compute and plot the error in each of the ICRF coordinates between the state vectors broadcast by the spacecraft in the telemetry and this GMAT trajectory. This allows us to see whether the trajectory broadcast by the spacecraft has changed slightly at some point.

As we can see, during the first day the error is close to zero. Afterwards, the trajectory deviates and the error starts growing to several hundreds of km. The new trajectory seems to be stable over the last few days (sorry about the lack of data on the night between the 11th and 12th). This is best shown in the figure below, where the state vector used as a seed to generate the GMAT trajectory is taken from the UTC evening of 2020-10-10. The error is only a fraction of a km. Therefore, we can consider final this new trajectory.

I have updated the calculations I did in the last post to use a state vector from the updated final trajectory. The results don’t change much. The calculations now locate the burn (approximated as an impulse burn) at 15:03:54 UTC with a delta-V of

[-31.08193895,  40.28872314, 308.12845989]

in ICRF coordinates, while my previous calculations estimated a burn at 15:03:59 with a delta-V of

[-31.49477234,  39.29765307, 308.11690616]

The state vector describing the updated post-DSM trajectory in heliocentric ICRF coordinates and UTC epoch is

Tianwen1.Epoch = '10 Oct 2020 19:08:50.122';
Tianwen1.X = 172262669.5024532
Tianwen1.Y = 42536664.64589398
Tianwen1.Z = 21989467.534531824
Tianwen1.VX = -1.7753279668677469
Tianwen1.VY = 25.966616665124505
Tianwen1.VZ = 11.810575717885476

As I have mentioned in several posts, the trajectory in which Tianwen-1 was launched had a closest approach to Mars of around 3 million km, so at some point a large correction manoeuvre was needed. We had already seen small manoeuvres TCM-1 and TCM-2, but we were expecting soon enough this large correction, which is called DSM (deep space manoeuvre). Some sources placed the DSM around the beginning of October, while others were more precise and mentioned that it would happen right after the Mid-Autumn festival holiday season, which this year ended on October 8.

This information turned out to be pretty accurate, since yesterday we heard news that Tianwen-1 had done its DSM at 15:00 UTC on 2020-10-09. This information quickly appeared in the news.

After the Bochum 20m antenna was able to acquire the spacecraft’s signal and gather telemetry at 19:09 UTC, we were able to confirm the manoeuvre in the state vectors transmitted by the spacecraft. Paul Marsh M0EYT was also able to receive telemetry confirming this, starting at 18:18 UTC. This post is an analysis of the data.