Galileo mission analysis

This is the report of the work done by the author in preparation and during his visit at the German Space Operation Center (GSOC) in Munich. Two space missions have been considered in order to test SOAP (Satellite Orbit Analysis Program, by "The Aerospace Corporation"), have a first training with it and analyze how it could be used for successive studies. The GSTBV2 mission is defined as first step of the Galileo constellation. Agile is an Italian Low Earth Orbit satellite. The work proceeded with the Galileo mission analysis. I evaluated each orbital perturbation alone and comparing the results with a reference case. The last step was the study of GSTBV2 in-orbit maneuvers. At this point some problems, possible bugs, of the software were met. The main results have been: 1) Preliminary SOAP results agree with the documented ones 2) Galileo out-of-plain maneuvers, the most expensive, can be excluded if the starting orbital parameters are carefully adjusted 3) The efficiency of GSTBV2 in-orbit maneuvers can be increased, if we spread the burn in subsequent orbits, as quasi-impulsive steps. In this way the total burn time reduces from 2.4/2.5 to 2.3/2.4 hours.