Compensation of Industrial CMOS Camera and Image Enhancement for Sounding Rocket Astrophysical Experiments

Suborbital missions of sounding rockets along the parabolic trajectory are commonly used for the Earth’s near space environment research or for the astrophysical observations with the time duration only in the order of several minutes. Such short-term missions are usually performed with a low-cost equipment as the exact opposite of long-term satellite missions with high-end and expensive technologies. In this paper there is described the usage of a low-cost industrial CMOS camera for the confirmation of accurate pointing of the Roentgen telescope during the Vela supernova observation. It requires a robust method of the image post-processing and the compensation of real properties of the camera system faced to the extreme space environment. Also a specific mode of the image acquisition is required due to temperature changes during the suborbital mission. As the result of our work, a low-cost camera could be used for simple and short-term tasks in space instead of an expensive space qualified system.