This paper examines the feasibility of using optical navigation techniques for precision orbit determination. These techniques can provide autonomous and self-contained navigation estimates for satellites orbiting the Earth or other planets such as Mars. Using a combination of identified absolute landmarks and frame-to-frame image features we present an Extended Kalman navigation filter that estimates the satellite's position and velocity. Of particular interest to this study is the filter performance when absolute (e.g., catalog-referenced) landmarks are quite rare. In a reference Mars orbit scenario, our simulations present position errors in the order of tens of kilometers, or better even if absolute measurements are only available every 30 minutes.
Landmark-based optical navigation using nanosatellite star trackers
2017-03-01
985998 byte
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English
A Focusing Procedure for Nanosatellite Star Trackers
AIAA | 2010
|COTS Detectors for Nanosatellite Star Trackers: A Case Study
British Library Conference Proceedings | 2011
|Image navigation improvement using star trackers
SPIE | 1996
|Online Contents | 1995
|NTRS | 1970