Aas 15-231 Improved Models for Attitude Estimation of Agile Space Objects

Several innovations are introduced to ameliorate error in space object attitude estimation. A radiometric measurement noise model is developed to define the observation uncertainty in terms of optical, environmental, and sensor parameters. This reduces biases in the space objects’ posterior state distributions. Additionally, a correlated angular rate dynamics model is adopted to decouple the effects of inertia and body torques for agile space objects. This novel dynamics model requires the adoption of marginalized particle filters to preserve computational tractability. The software framework is outlined, and simulated results are presented to demonstrate resultant reductions in agile space object attitude estimation error.