James Webb Space Telescope Fuel Slosh Estimation

The mitigation of fuel slosh in microgravity environments is a pressing matter for the control of both manned and unmanned spacecraft. Recent work has investi- gated negative mass modeling of fuel slosh using Lie Group SE(3) . This paper applies Lie group SE(3) to the full body problem of spacecraft dynamics to inves- tigate attitude perturbations caused by fuel slosh aboard the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). We develop a dynamical model to parse these perturbations from slew telemetry data via residuals analysis. This model uses a novel, N-body Runge-Kutta integrator in the special Euclidean group SE(3) . Frequency analysis of the resulting angular velocity residuals did not yield the expected slosh modes.