StarNav III: A Three Fields of View Star Tracker12

0-7803-7231-X/01/$10.00/© 2002 IEEE 2 IEEEAC paper #050, Updated November 29, 2001 Abstract—Italian Space Agency has funded, as one of the possible Italian experiment on board the International Space Station, the development of a new star tracker, called StarNav III, which observes the sky by means of three orthogonal fields of view and focuses all the star images onto a single CCD/CMOS imager. The main characteristics of this sensor are a high gain in the attitude accuracy estimation and in the operating time. These benefits cost, however, in terms of hardware and software design which are, in turn, more complex. The StarNav III feasibility study, recently completed, has output a variety of new software approaches (as, for instance, for acquisition, centroiding, star identification, and mirror misalignment), most of which can directly be applied to almost all of the existing CCD/CMOS star trackers. This paper shows the principal aspects of the relevant feasibility study.