Star Identification and Attitude Determination With Projective Cameras

Christian, John A.

doi:10.1109/access.2021.3054836

Cited by 21 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 63 publications

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“…Moreover, following the terminology of Kaplan [40], define absolute triangulation as triangulation performed exclusively with absolute LOS directions and having a solution at the intersection of two (or more) LOPs. Most spacecraft have excellent attitude knowledge (e.g., from star trackers [41][42][43]) and so the absolute triangulation problem occurs frequently in spaceflight applications. Absolute triangulation is the primary topic of this manuscript and numerous algorithms are presented to accomplish this task (see Sections IV and V).…”

Section: Background and The Lexicon Of Triangulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Absolute Triangulation Algorithms for Space Exploration

Henry¹,

Christian²

2022

Preprint

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Images are an important source of information for spacecraft navigation and for threedimensional reconstruction of observed space objects. Both of these applications take the form of a triangulation problem when the camera has a known attitude and the measurements extracted from the image are line of sight (LOS) directions. This work provides a comprehensive review of the history and theoretical foundations of triangulation. A variety of classical triangulation algorithms are reviewed, including a number of suboptimal linear methods (many LOS measurements) and the optimal method of Hartley and Sturm (only two LOS measurements). Two new optimal non-iterative triangulation algorithms are introduced that provide the same solution as Hartley and Sturm. The optimal two-measurement case can be solved as a quadratic equation in many common situations. The optimal many-measurement case may be solved without iteration as a linear system using the new Linear Optimal Sine Triangulation (LOST) method. The various triangulation algorithms are assessed with a few numerical examples, including planetary terrain relative navigation, angles-only optical navigation at Uranus, 3-D reconstruction of Notre-Dame de Paris, and angles-only relative navigation.

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Section: Background and The Lexicon Of Triangulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Absolute Triangulation Algorithms for Space Exploration

Henry¹,

Christian²

2022

Preprint

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“…Indeed, in a typical camera calibration (e.g., Refs. [23], [32], [33]), it is impossible to obtain numerical values for the focal length or the pixel pitch without assuming the other is known.…”

Section: ) Relating Image Plane and Pixel Coordinatesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The spacecraft navigator is most likely familiar with the classical (one-sided) orthogonal Procrustes problem within the context of attitude determination from corresponding unit vectors [33], where it is one of the well-known solutions to Wahba's problem [96], [97]. The one-sided orthogonal Procrustes problem takes the form min T A − T B 2 F subject to T T T = I, and was studied as early as the 1950s [98].…”

Section: ) Two-sided Orthogonal Procrustes Problemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Tutorial on Horizon-Based Optical Navigation and Attitude Determination With Space Imaging Systems

Christian

2021

IEEE Access

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Images of a nearby celestial body collected by a camera on an exploration spacecraft contain a wealth of actionable information. This work considers how the apparent location of the observed body's horizon in a digital image may be used to infer the relative position, attitude, or both. When the celestial body is a sphere, spheroid, or ellipsoid (as is the case for most large bodies in the Solar System), the projected horizon in an image is a conic-usually an ellipse at large distances and a hyperbola at small distances. This work develops non-iterative and analytically exact methods for every case (all combinations of unknown state parameters and quadric shapes), completely superseding older horizon-based methods that are iterative, approximate, or both. Some of the analytic methods presented in this work are new. Recognizing that these developments build on techniques that may be unfamiliar to many spacecraft navigators, this work is fashioned as a tutorial. Descriptive illustrations and numerical examples are provided to make concepts clear and to validate the proposed algorithms.

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“…These are acquired by image processing whose modeling is out of scope of this work. Techniques based on centroiding are usually employed to retrieve such LOS measurements [8,35].…”

Section: Measurements Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…M-ARGO considers a two optical heads star sensor to achieve 9 arcseconds attitude determination. The LoS directions to the deep-space objects are usually acquired via centroiding techniques on the image plane that achieve subpixel accuracy in the order of 0.1 pixels [8,35]. This translates to 3 arcseconds for the M-ARGO optical sensor.…”

Section: Simulation Settingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deep-Space Optical Navigation for M-ARGO Mission

et al. 2021

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The Miniaturised Asteroid Remote Geophysical Observer (M-ARGO) mission is designed to be ESA’s first stand-alone CubeSat to independently travel in deep space with its own electric propulsion and direct-to-Earth communication systems in order to rendezvous with a near-Earth asteroid. Deep-space Cubesats are appealing owing to the scaled mission costs. However, the operational costs are comparable to those of traditional missions if ground-based orbit determination is employed. Thus, autonomous navigation methods are required to favour an overall scaling of the mission cost for deep-space CubeSats. M-ARGO is assumed to perform an autonomous navigation experiment during the deep-space cruise phase. This paper elaborates on the deep-space navigation experiment exploiting the line-of-sight directions to visible beacons in the Solar System. The aim is to assess the experiment feasibility and to quantify the performances of the method. Results indicate feasibility of the autonomous navigation for M-ARGO with a 3σ accuracy in the order of 1000 km for the position components and 1 m/s for the velocity components in good observation conditions, utilising miniaturized optical sensors.

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Star Identification and Attitude Determination With Projective Cameras

Cited by 21 publications

References 63 publications

Absolute Triangulation Algorithms for Space Exploration

Absolute Triangulation Algorithms for Space Exploration

A Tutorial on Horizon-Based Optical Navigation and Attitude Determination With Space Imaging Systems

Deep-Space Optical Navigation for M-ARGO Mission

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