Method and apparatus for controlling spacecraft attitude with rotational star trackers

摘要

High precision spacecraft (108) attitude determination is produced by specially positioning (100) the spacecraft's star trackers (112) and then filtering (102) out measurement errors produced from star tracker electronics (216). In addition to the conventional azimuth and elevation controls used for star tracker pointing, the star tracker detector array (400) is rotationally positioned about its boresight (900) so that its pixels (401) are traversed by the imaged star path (404) at an angle within 20 DEG of diagonal. This forces both vertical and horizontal spatial error components (700, 702) in the detector plane to a high frequency range at which they can easily be filtered out (102) in common <IMAGE>