Drag-Free and Attitude Control for the GOCE satellite

The paper concerns Drag-Free and Attitude Control (DFAC) of the European satellite GOCE to be employed during scientific mission phase. DFAC has been designed and tested on the end-to-end GOCE simulator. The design has followed the Embedded Model Control methodology, where a spacecraft/environment discrete-time model (embedded model) becomes the real-time core of the DFAC and is interfaced to the plant via tunable command and measurement laws. Simulation results are presented.