Effective direction measurements for spacecraft attitude: III. Defective directions and data fusion

Two effective measurements are examined which represent attitude information defectively, that is, part of the information is discarded in the effective measurement. These effective measurements are tested for the fusion of a star-tracker attitude estimate with a direction measurement from a vector Sun sensor. The defective directions tested are the Brozenec-Bender vector and those in the prescription of Bar-Itzhack and Harman. These are compared with maximum-likelihood estimation based on all measurements and with the startracker attitude estimate alone. Naturally, the approximate algorithms do not perform as well as maximum-likelihood estimation without approximation.

[1]  Malcolm D. Shuster,et al.  The generalized Wahba problem , 2006 .

[2]  M. Shuster.  Effective direction measurements for spacecraft attitude: I. Equivalent directions , 2007 .

[3]  D. K. Ward,et al.  The Attitude Control System for the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe , 2005 .

[4]  M. Shuster.  Constraint in attitude estimation part II: Unconstrained estimation , 2003 .

[5]  M. Shuster.  Effective direction measurements for spacecraft attitude: II. Predicted directions , 2007 .

[6]  A Suboptimal Algorithm for Attitude Determination from Multiple Star Cameras , 2007 .

[7]  Optimal Fusion of a Given Quaternion with Vector Measurements , 2002 .

[8]  John L. Crassidis,et al.  Attitude estimation for large field-of-view sensors , 2006 .

[9]  M. Shuster,et al.  Three-axis attitude determination from vector observations , 1981 .

[10]  M. Shuster.  A survey of attitude representation , 1993 .

[11]  Malcolm D. Shuster,et al.  AAS 07-102 ROBUSTNESS AND ACCURACY OF THE QUEST ALGORITHM , 2007 .

[12]  G. Wahba.  A Least Squares Estimate of Satellite Attitude , 1965 .

[13]  D. Bender,et al.  A simple suboptimal least-squares algorithm for attitude determination with multiple sensors , 1994 .

[14]  E. J. Lefferts,et al.  Kalman Filtering for Spacecraft Attitude Estimation , 1982 .

[15]  Malcolm D. Shuster.  Survey of attitude representations , 1993 .

[16]  Malcolm D. Shuster,et al.  SCAD—A Fast Algorithm for Star Camera Attitude Determination , 2004 .

[17]  F. Markley,et al.  Quaternion Attitude Estimation Using Vector Observations , 2000 .