Effect Of Earth Albedo Variation On The Performance Of Spatial Acquisition Subsystem Aboard A Planetary Spacecraft

Deep-space optical communication systems generally require the use of the Sun- lit Earth as the pointing reference. For simple single-frame spatial acquisition processors, the uncertainties in Earth albedo can result in an irreducible error in acquiring the spatial location of the receiver. Multiple frame processing algorithms can be used to estimate the Earth albedo. The prior knowledge of the image shape and orientation can then be used to derive the location of the receiver.