Model Reconstruction for Body-Mounted Solar Arrays of Satellites Based on Limited Information.

In this paper, a reconstruction approach for simulating the output performance of a satellite's solar array (SA) is proposed. This approach introduces an Earth-reflected irradiance and a degradation model that affect the performance in-orbit to reconstruct a typical single diode model. The main feature of this reconstruction is that the computational procedure is convenient and can be programmed to the microcomputer system for real-time performance monitoring. Based on limited information from the manufacturer's datasheet, the single diode model is parameterized. In addition, an effective method of determining initial values is presented to avoid nonconvergence in the parameterization. Moreover, Earth-reflected irradiance on a body-mounted SA is simulated analytically with the parallel and perpendicular view factors. The degradation of the SA performance is modeled by a nonlinear regression method. Finally, the reconstructed model is applied to simulate the SA performance of microsatellite Tianxun-1 (TX-1) developed by Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. The measured results over four years in space verify the validity of the proposed reconstruction approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]