MICROSCOPE instrument in-flight characterization

Abstract

Since the MICROSCOPE instrument aims to measure accelerations as low as a few 10${}^{-15}$\,m\,s${}^{-2}$ and cannot operate on ground, it was obvious to have a large time dedicated to its characterization in flight. After its release and first operation, the characterization experiments covered all the aspects of the instrument design in order to consolidate the scientific measurements and the subsequent conclusions drawn from them. Over the course of the mission we validated the servo-control and even updated the PID control laws for each inertial sensor. Thanks to several dedicated experiments and the analysis of the instrument sensitivities, we have been able to identify a number of instrument characteristics such as biases, gold wire and electrostatic stiffnesses, non linearities, couplings and free motion ranges of the test-masses, which may first impact the scientific objective and secondly the analysis of the instrument good operation.

This paper is part of set of articles dedicated to the final results of MICROSCOPE space mission and submitted to CQG

References in corpus (6)

• Space test of the Equivalence Principle: first results of the MICROSCOPE mission
• MICROSCOPE's constraint on a short-range fifth force
• MICROSCOPE mission analysis, requirements and expected performance
• MICROSCOPE Mission scenario, ground segment and data processing
• MICROSCOPE mission: Data analysis principle
• MICROSCOPE: systematic errors

Cited by in corpus (7)

• MICROSCOPE mission: final results of the test of the Equivalence Principle
• Result of the MICROSCOPE Weak Equivalence Principle test
• MICROSCOPE's constraint on a short-range fifth force
• MICROSCOPE mission analysis, requirements and expected performance
• MICROSCOPE Mission scenario, ground segment and data processing
• MICROSCOPE: systematic errors
• On the first test of the Weak Equivalence Principle in low Earth orbit