...
The following plots show the results (mind the scales on the y axes, usually the differences are very small!):
As you can see, there are differences, but they are very small. There is only one case (QSJ_
23) where the differences could be not negligible (~ 2%
). QSJ_2 is the Y component of the vectorial part of the attitude quaternion. Usually the attitude quaternion is taken directly from the ATT message in the Magic 7 file. Those messages are issued by the spacecraft 5 times per second. Anyway, there are cases when there is no ATT message corresponding to a particular time interval, thus the codes have to interpolate (or extrapolate)
. This usually can happen at the very beginning of a run, or because of gaps in the Magic 7 file. The differences between the two codes arises mainly from two different strategies adopted for the interpolation/extrapolation: the old code uses only those ATT messages arriving in sync with an ORB message (that is, one time per second), discarding the others; the new code, instead, uses all the available ATT messages. Thus, the new code should provide better interpolation/extrapolation.