ESA GNC Conference Papers Repository

During the scientific observations of the BepiColombo mission around Mercury, the performance of the onboard instruments may be affected by the micro-vibrations caused by the reaction wheels and the driving mechanisms of the Solar Array (SA) and the High Gain Antenna (HGA). Most of the instruments require continuous and highly-accurate nadir-pointing. In particular, the line-of-sight stability must be better than 1 arcsec over 1 sec and better than 0.1 arcsec over 1 msec. These requirements are to be met 95% of the time over the 2 years of science operation. The purpose of this study was the definition of a methodology to assess the pointing stability contributions due to the micro-vibrations originating from the different disturbance sources on-board, in order to verify the requirements.