Benchmarking re-entry prediction uncertainties: GOCE Re-Entry Prediction Uncertainty Analysis
During the three week decay period between the end-of-mission and the atmospheric re-entry of the ESA Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) vehicle, the orbital data collection through a vast set of on board sensors resulted in a very rich set of data.
The aim of this project was 'to exploit the rich telemetry data set of GOCE to the fullest on the topic of re-entry predictions and extract lessons beyond the re-entry of GOCE itself', by means of any theoretical and computational methods helping to predict the orbit evolution of the object in space expected to impact on ground due to loss of altitude due to orbit perturbations.