Satellite mechanical health monitoring

An ultra-sensitive tri-axial accelerometer package is carried on the Olympus telecommunications spacecraft which measures the very small vibrations caused by operation of the on-board equipment. The vibration signals are sampled and transmitted to Earth as digital signals. A recent study shows that the occurrence of a particular vibration condition can be identified automatically. The paper reports on the characterisation of the microvibration environment on the spacecraft and on the condition monitoring techniques which have been applied. >