Fast spacecraft solar radiation pressure modeling by ray tracing on graphics processing unit

A novel method is presented to evaluate on the graphics processing unit (GPU) the force and torque on a spacecraft due to solar radiation pressure. The method employs efficient ray tracing techniques, developed in the graphics rendering discipline, to resolve spacecraft self-shadowing and reflections at faster than real-time computation speed. The primary algorithmic components of the ray tracing process which contribute to the method’s computational efficiency are described. These components include two-level bounding volume hierarchy acceleration data structures, fast ray to bounding box intersection testing using the slab intersection algorithm and fast triangle intersection testing using the Möller-Trumbore algorithm. Spacecraft material optical properties are represented as a combination of Lambertian diffuse and ideal specular reflections. Both diffuse and specular ray-surface interactions are modeled. The approach is implemented using C++ and OpenCL and executed on a consumer grade GPU. Model validation is presented comparing ray traced force and torque values to the same quantities produce by a faceted analytic model. Numerical results illustrate the impact of self-shadowing on the force and torque calculation, and demonstrate the fast computational speed that is enabled with this implementation.