A Fiber Optic Gyro-Based Attitude Control System for Autonomous Target Tracking
- Paper number
IAC-17,C1,IP,27,x41751
- Year
2017
- Abstract
Autonomous terrestrial target-tracking applications using small satellites are demanding stringent pointing performance, prompting the need for developing high-precision attitude estimation and control systems that adhere to cost and mass constraints. Based on high-fidelity simulations and in-orbit results, it has been demonstrated that the standard attitude determination \& control system onboard the Space Flight Laboratory's NEMO-class satellites is capable of constraining the attitude and rate estimation errors to below 0.05$^{\circ}$ and 0.04$^{\circ}$/s during terrestrial target tracking maneuvers, and the overall pointing performance error can be constrained below 0.3$^{\circ}$ (2$\sigma$). While the attitude performance offered by the ADCS of the NEMO-platform enables a very wide range of important applications from low-Earth orbit, in anticipation to missions demanding more stringent pointing performance, a higher-precision ADCS technology is already under development at the Space Flight Laboratory of Toronto, Canada. This paper discusses the design of a robust ADCS architecture tailored to constrain the ground target pointing error of NEMO-class satellites to well below 0.1$^{\circ}$ (3$\sigma$). An attitude determination filter that combines single or dual star tracker measurements sampled at exactly 1Hz fused with three orthogonally-mounted high-grade miniaturized fiber optic gyroscopes (FOGs) operating at higher cadence (5Hz) is presented. To evaluate the performance of this system, autonomous ground-target tracking simulations using the mission and system parameters of a NEMO-platform in low-Earth orbit were conducted for inertially-fixed and moving-target scenarios.- Abstract document
- Manuscript document
(absent)