Traditional star trackers are designed for high accuracy but low update rate and rely on rate gyros to interpolate between measurements. However, the available rate gyros are either noisy, or expensive and heavy. The proposed work demonstrates the advantage of sacrificing some of the star tracker's accuracy for a higher update rate. As a result, aside from removing the need for a rate gyro, Attitude Determination and Control Systems overall performances are increased. The proposed star tracker achieved a 0.001 ° accurate Attitude Determination, with a 98.8% sky coverage at a 50Hz update rate. In addition, the image processing and star matching algorithm are designed to be efficiently implemented as a fully pipelined single-pass FPGA circuit.
High Update Rate Star Tracker for Gyroless Spacecraft Operation
2018-06-01
1843244 byte
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English
Spacecraft Acquisiton Maneuvers Using Position-Based Gyroless Control
European Patent Office | 2017
|Gyroless fine pointing on Small Explorer Spacecraft
NTRS | 1993
|Gyroless Fine Pointing on Small Explorer Spacecraft
British Library Conference Proceedings | 1993
|