The ECSS Control Performance standard provides solid and exact elements to build up a performance error budget. However, the elements recommended are not embedded in an engineering framework and thus an intermediate document developing a Pointing Error Engineering (PEE) methodology was formulated, as foreseen in Note 3 of ECSS-E-ST-60-10C:

"For their own specific purpose, each entity (ESA, national agencies, primes) can further elaborate internal documents, deriving appropriate guidelines and summation rules based on the top-level clauses gathered in this E-ST-60-10C standard."

The purpose of Pointing Error Engineering Handbook is to be used by ESA projects as reference document providing clauses, guidelines, recommendations and examples, consistent with and elaborating the E-ST-60-10C for the specific case of satellite pointing errors.

The handbook provides

• guidelines for characterization of pointing error sources,
• guidelines for analysing pointing error source contribution to the actual pointing error index,
• summation and compilation guidelines for the system pointing error budget.

Specific and quantitative performance pointing requirements are expressed as usual in the ESA Mission Requirement Document and System Requirement Document, and further broken down and engineered by the prime contractor in the various project phases.

The Pointing Error Engineering Handbook can be downloaded in PDF format using the link provided in the Downloads page.

Handbook Update

A currently ongoing ESA contract activity is about to update the handbook:

The foreseen update of the PEEH is first intended to harmonize the tool and the handbook, and so to include the developed generalization concept for the ECSS "statistical interpretation" (for which the tool is slightly ahead, see this paper).

Also with this update, the feedback from the users of the handbook and the lessons learned during previous PEET activities are collected and processed to improve the handbook with additional guidelines introducing /including:

• a description of the approaches and background related to the PDF-based "advanced statistical method"
• an extension and diversification of the metrics for relative errors within a time-window
• guidelines for Monte-Carlo simulations in the context of achievable accuracy