Design, imlementation, and flight results for all-stellar attitude determination

摘要

An all-stellar attitude determination capability has been developed for both the Mars Climate Orbiter (MCO) and the Stardust spacecraft. This capability was designed to both save power and extend IMU life, thereby enabling the extended missions of these spacecraft. Both spacecraft incorporate a wide field-of-view (WFOV) Star Tracker Camera developed by Corning-OCA under contract to Lockheed martin. The "lost-in-space" capability provided by this camera and the associated Stellar Compass~TM software allows a robust all-stellar solution.