Attitude determination, along with attitude control, is critical to functioning of every space mission. In this paper, we investigate and compare, through simulation, the application of two autonomous sequential attitude estimation algorithms, adopted from the literature, for attitude determination using attitude sensors (sun sensor and horizon sensors) and rate-integrating gyros. The two algor...

A multi-antenna-based GNSS receiver is capable of providing high-precision and drift-free attitude solution. Carrier phase measurements need be utilized to achieve high-precision attitude. The traditional attitude determination methods in the measurement domain and the position domain resolve the attitude and the ambiguity sequentially. The redundant measurements from multiple baselines have no...

Attitude determination, along with attitude control, is critical to functioning of every space mission. Here, we investigate the application of a steady-state Kalman Filter for attitude determination using attitude sensors (sun sensor and horizon sensors) and rate integrating gyros. The three-axis steady-state Kalman Filter formulation, adopted from literature, offers obvious computational adva...

In attitude determination using GPS, the accuracy of results is influenced directly by the satellite selection of the differenced observations. Based on the information of satellites, such as elevation, azimuth and signal to noise ratio, we apply a weighted selection method to obtain the satellite combination used in attitude determination. This method also considered the quality of satellite s...

The Ørsted satellite mission imposes comparatively high requirements on autonomy of the attitude control system. Cost requirements, on the other hand, impose simple hardware and cheap actuators in form of magnetorquer coils. These conflicting requirements are fulfilled through development of novel attitude and control algorithms and wide on-board autonomy. The entire control and attitude determ...

Introduction: The Joint Milli-Arcsecond Pathfinder Survey 1 (JMAPS) is a Department of the Navy space astrometry mission to conduct an all-sky, bright star astrometric and spectrophotometric survey. The primary goal of the mission is to update the bright star catalog currently used by Department of Defense, NASA, and commercial star tracker manufacturers for spacecraft attitude determination. S...

This paper presents a method for on-orbit calibration of photodiodes for sun sensing in an attitude determination system. The calibration estimates the scale factors and alignment angles of the photodiodes, resulting in higher attitude determination accuracy than achieved with the pre-flight calibration parameters. The calibration is implemented with an extended Kalman filter to simultaneously ...

The star sensor has been widely used as an important and accurate attitude measurement sensor in classical satellite attitude determination systems. This paper analyses the influence of star sensor’s sampling frequency on attitude determination accuracy within an Extended Kalman filter (EKF). Simulations are used to validate the theoretical analysis and determine the parameters of the influence...

In this paper, we proposed a coarse-alignment method for strapdown inertial navigation systems based on attitude determination. The observation vectors, which can be obtained by inertial sensors, usually contain various types of noise, which affects the convergence rate and the accuracy of the coarse alignment. Given this drawback, we studied an attitude-determination method named optimal-REQUE...

The Inertial Stellar Compass (ISC) is a miniature, low power, stellar inertial attitude determination system with an accuracy of better than 0.1o (1 sigma) in three axes. The ISC consumes only 3.5 Watts of power and is contained in a 2.5 kg package. With its embedded onboard processor, the ISC provides attitude quaternion information and has Lost-in-Space (LIS) initialization capability. The at...