On-Orbit Performance of Autonomous Star Trackers

This paper presents the results of a performance study of the autonomous star trackers (ASTs) on the IMAGE and the EO-1 spacecraft. IMAGE is a spinning spacecraft without gyros or redundant precision attitude sensors, so the statistical properties of the AST are estimated simply by comparing the output observed quaternions with a rigid rotator model with constant angular momentum. The initial conditions are determined by a least-squares fit to minimize the AST residuals. An additional fit is used to remove the remaining systematic error and to obtain the inherent sensor noise. Gyro rate data are available for the EO-1 mission, so the AST noise statistics are obtained from the residuals after solving for an epoch attitude and gyro bias also using a least-squares method.