Performance Of Star Sensor Research Articles

Impact of proton radiation and annealing of CMOS image sensors on star sensor performance

Star sensors play a crucial role as high-precision optical attitude navigation devices in satellite attitude control systems. The CMOS image sensor is an important component of the imaging system of the star sensor and experiences performance degradation due to the total ionizing dose effect and displacement damage effect in the radiation environment of its long-term operational workspace. As a result, the detection capability and attitude positioning accuracy of the star sensor gradually deteriorate. The performance of CMOS image sensors can be partially restored after annealing but the impact on the performance of star sensors is unclear. This study conducted 100 MeV proton irradiation experiments with different fluences on CMOS image sensors and performed room temperature and high temperature annealing treatments. By testing and analyzing the performance of star sensors equipped with irradiated and different annealing treatments on CMOS image sensors, the impact mechanism of CMOS image sensor radiation damage and annealing recovery on the performance variation of star sensors was obtained. This study provides theoretical support for reliability of long-term in-orbit star sensors.

An attitude tracking method for star sensor under dynamic conditions

The tracking performance of star sensor degrades seriously under dynamic conditions. To improve the tracking accuracy and efficiency, an attitude tracking method based on unscented Kalman filter (UKF) and singular value decomposition (SVD) is proposed in this paper. The star sensor is modeled as a nonlinear stochastic system, the state of which is attitude quaternion. The quaternion can be estimated by UKF, then the predicted attitude and corresponding star positions are obtained. To ensure the stability of attitude tracking, SVD is applied to obtain the sigma points in UKF continuously. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method yields high accuracy and efficiency in attitude tracking. This method provides a practical approach to ensure the tracking performance of star sensor under dynamic conditions.

Algorithm Enhancement of STELLAR on LAPAN-A4 Satellite

The first LAPAN’s experimental star sensor has onboard on LAPAN-A3/LAPAN-IPB microsatellite that successfully launch on June, 6 2016. The second LAPAN’s experimental star sensor called STELLAR has scheduled to be onboard on LAPAN-A4 satellite. In orbit test of first star sensor provide conclusions. One of the conclusion is the radiation in space has an impact on star sensor performance. Many hot pixels or hotspots appear on CCD sensor temporarily that it causes a failure of star identification since the hotspots are fake stars. In order to solve this problem, an enhancement of algorithm is conducted. The enhancement aims to ignore the fake stars to proceed as stars candidate. This method selects a cloud pixel as star candidate and proceed only clouds pixel. The algorithm was tested and give more reliable result of star identification.

A Robust Star Acquisition Algorithm Based on Facet Model

An efficient and robust star acquisition algorithm based on facet fitting is presented to improve the performance of star sensors. The location of star central pixels can be determined by searching extremum intensity pixels among the point spread function (PSF) of stars, which is well fitted by the cubic facet model. According to extremum theory, the second derivative operators are pre-calculated and the searching process can be completed using convolution operations thrice. Simultaneously, cluster formation is also a time consuming routine, which is accomplished using specific maximum and minimum threshold to speed up it. A variety of experiments are carried out to validate the performance of proposed algorithm, moreover, the performance evaluation index M is presented. The results clearly show that the proposed algorithm makes a great progress than the vector method in time expense and accuracy under intense noise conditions.

A High-speed Simulation Method of Star Map Based on Three Orthogonal Axis Planes

为在地面上进行星图模拟以测试星图识别算法和星敏感器性能, 提出了一种新的快速星图模拟方法. 该方法利用截面圆和固定区域的性质, 将单位天球按照三个正交主轴平面进行等分, 根据赤纬值求解恒星矢量与主轴平面夹角来确定选星条件, 进而根据坐标变换原理进行星图模拟. 为验证所提方法与现有方法相比的优势, 进行了大量的仿真实验. 实验结果表明, 与现有星图模拟方法相比, 本文方法在保证星图模拟精度的条件下, 选星速度提高了3倍以上.