Attitude determination is a critical part of many small satellite missions. While many sensors exist to determine the attitude, many of the commercially available solutions can be prohibitively expensive. With an increasing number of student and amateur flown missions, cost is a major point of consideration. As many of these student, amateur and otherwise low-cost missions fly some form of imaging system, it is ideal to find a use for these optical systems for precision attitude determination. While star tracking may seem like the obvious use of a space based camera, stars can be quite difficult to observe directly with low-cost imaging hardware. This paper proposes a sequential filtering approach based on the Unscented Quaternion Estimator for estimating both the attitude and angular rate of a spacecraft by imaging the surface of the Earth and utilizing computationally efficient feature tracking techniques. The performance of this approach is shown using multiple simulated cases.
ATTITUDE DETERMINATION VIA EARTH SURFACE FEATURE TRACKING GIVEN PRECISE ORBIT KNOWLEDGE
Proceedings of the 44th Annual American Astronautical Society Guidance, Navigation, and Control Conference, 2022 ; Chapter : 64 ; 1163-1178
2024-01-01
16 pages
Article/Chapter (Book)
Electronic Resource
English
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