An aluminum prototype of the Amica Star Tracker Support (ASTS) of the AMS_02 (Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer) experiment has been instrumented with two Fiber Bragg Gratings (FBGs). AMS_02 is a 7 tons particle physics experiment that is planned to run on the International Space Station for 3 years starting from October 2005. The star tracker, as all the sub-detectors in AMS, has to satisfy the stru...

Since its launch in September of 1999, the IKONOS satellite has been consistently providing high quality 1-meter panchromatic and 4-meter multispectral images. Accurate interior and exterior orientation enable IKONOS to achieve high geometric accuracy with or without ground control. Exterior orientation is determined by on-board GPS receivers, star trackers, gyros, and interlock angles. Post-pr...

We report evidence for the granulation signal in the star Procyon A, based on two photometric time series from the star tracker on the WIRE satellite. The power spectra show evidence of excess power around 1mHz, consistent with the detection of p-modes reported from radial velocity measurements. We see a significant increase in the noise level below 3mHz, which we interpret as the granulation s...

This paper presents the design and performance evaluation of a novel integrated attitude filter with application to space navigation. The design is based directly on the sensor measurements as opposed to traditional solutions that resort to rotation parameterizations. The information provided by a low-cost star tracker is merged with the measurements of a triaxial rate gyro to provide accurate ...

This paper presents a study using Genetic Algorithms (GA) to solve the star pattern recognition problem associated with star tracker attitude determination systems. Characteristics of the stars that are visible within the Field of View (FOV) of an imager are defined with regard to relative distances and angles. The proposed GA minimizes the discrepancy between the characteristics of the stars i...

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....

There is clear scientific interest in using the photometry from a star tracker to observe variable stars. Despite the small aperture, the advantages of space (long observing periods and no atmospheric scintillation) make such a camera superior to ground-based telescopes for some applications. The only example so far has been the work by Buzasi et al. (2000 and these Proceedings), who are making...

Observations of ǫ UMa obtained with the star tracker on the Wide Field Infrared Explorer (WIRE) satellite during a month in mid-2000 are analyzed. This is one of the most precise photometry of an Ap star. The amplitude spectrum is used to set an upper limit of 75 parts per million for the amplitude of stellar pulsations in this star unless it accidentally oscillates with a single mode at the sa...

In this paper several approaches for on-orbit calibration of a star tracker camera for the EO-3 GIFTS mission (2004) are presented. For this mission a well-calibrated star camera will be required in order to estimate attitude to within design requirements. A first order calibration involves the determination of the principal point offsets (xo, yo) and best effective focal length of the camera. ...

ABSTARCT The quark-gluon matter produced in RHIC collisions has high s-quark content [1]. This suggests an equally high probability of Ds mesons formation during the different decay processes. We reconstructed Ds mesons using data from earlier runs; these encompass about ten thousand events. We also investigated the significance of the reconstructed signal as well as the efficiency of the metho...