Consideration of Thermo-Vacuum Stability of a MEMS Gyroscope for Space Applications

Thermo-vacuum stability of the aerospace gyroscopes is one of the crucial issues in the harsh and remote environment of space. This paper reports a bias drift compensation algorithm for the MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) gyroscope with atmosphere package. This approach takes advantage of linear frequency–temperature dependence and linear amplitude–pressure dependence for self-compensation of the gyroscope bias drifts in real-time. The dependences were analyzed and evaluated by subjecting the gyroscope to a thermo-vacuum condition. The real-time self-compensation yielded a total bias error of 0.01°/s over a temperature range of 7–45 °C. A MEMS rate sensor was flown in space and the on-orbit data also verify the effectiveness of the approach.