The vibration environment on a satellite in orbit

Platform vibration is likely to become one of the problems affecting the design of high pointing accuracy payloads of future spacecraft. There are two aspects to this issue: (1) the vibration of the spacecraft transmitted to the payload requires development of an appropriate pointing control strategy to reduce the effects of this vibration, and (2) the vibration produced by the payload itself needs to be limited so that other vibration sensitive systems attached to the spacecraft are not adversely affected. One may thus think of a payload as either a recipient or as a source of vibration. The authors review the experience of the in-orbit environment of the Olympus telecommunications satellite and discuss the nature of the vibration produced by a variety of devices by reference to measurements from the spacecraft