Microscope instrument in-flight characterization
Ratana Chhun, Émilie Hardy, Manuel Rodrigues, Pierre Touboul, Gilles Métris, Joël Bergé, Damien Boulanger, Bruno Christophe, Pascale Danto, Bernard Foulon, Pierre-Yves Guidotti, Phuong-Anh Huynh, Vincent Lebat, Françoise Liorzou, Alain Robert
Abstract
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 necessary 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.