HiFi-SoRaP

The aim of this project is to develop an efficient way of computing the solar radiation pressure acceleration that acts on a spacecraft.

This acceleration is produced by the impact of the photons emitted by the Sun onto a spacecraft's surface. This collision generates an acceleration which affects its motion and has a relevant effect on a long-term propagation.

This proposal studies which models can be used to approximate the computation of this acceleration. Some of the models are more efficient and some others are more accurate. The objective was to find a model that is both efficient and accurate. In order to do so, some of the most accurate models were implemented using the GPU to parallelize part of the computation. The chosen model that fulfils both conditionsis based on the Raytrace technique. It considers secondary rays (bounces) in order to obtain more precision when computing the acceleration.