Highlights Optical parameter calibration of star tracker with star images is improved. Camera is fixed on earth, so attitudes of images are correlated with Earth’s rotation. The number of attitude states in the estimation reduced to 1 by Earth rotating model. Covariances of the estimated optical parameters decreased with Earth’s rotation model.
Abstract A low-budget calibration method for a star tracker using Earth’s rotation is presented. The rotating Earth is one of the most accurate turntables in nature, as its rotation rate and axis are known precisely, thanks to astronomers. Using a precise model of the Earth’s rotation and time tags, it is possible to set the attitude of a star tracker fixed on the ground so that all star measurements can be used in a full-state estimation with only one attitude state. The proposed method needs only a GPS receiver that outputs pulse-per second signals for time synchronization, which is useful for low-budget star-tracker development in university-level CubeSat projects. The simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms the previous calibration method, which does not use the Earth’s rotation, in terms of estimate covariance. An outdoor experiment demonstrated the accuracy of the star tracker calibration with low-cost hardware.
Low-budget CubeSat star tracker calibration using Earth’s rotation
Advances in Space Research ; 70 , 7 ; 1880-1889
2022-06-21
10 pages
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English
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