Abstract Details
| Name: Mayuresh Sarpotdar Affiliation: Indian Institute of Astrophysics Conference ID: ASI2016_714 Title : Design and Development of a Star Sensor - StarSense Authors and Co-Authors : Jayant Murthy, Margarita Safonova Indian Institute of Astrophysics Abstract Type : Poster Abstract Category : Instrumentation and Techniques Abstract : We have developed a star sensor (StarSense) for use in CubeSats to determine the satellite’s attitude/orientation with an accuracy of 30". The sensor was designed in-house and comprises a Tessar lens which images the star field onto a radiation-hardened Star1000 CMOS detector with a MIL-grade Spartan-6 FPGA readout. The entire instrument was designed to minimize weight and power requirements. We chose the field of view of the sensor to be 10o with a limiting magnitude of 6.5m based on a sky simulation using the Hipparcos Bright Star Catalog. The requirement for attitude determination over the entire sky requires that we observe at least 3 stars in every field over the sky. One of the more challenging aspects of designing a star sensor is that it is intended for use in space and the algorithms must be fast yet without requiring much processing power. We have used the LEON SPARC v8 microcontroller which is rugged and fault tolerant to single event upsets and has an open source VHDL code. In StarSense we sequentially use Centroiding Algorithm, Geometric Voting Algorithm and QUEST Algorithm to process the acquired images and obtain the quaternion between the Inertial coordinate system and Sensor coordinate system. This quaternion is further passed on to the Attitude Control System of the satellite. We simulated these algorithms to estimate their performance parameters such as sky coverage, required memory, calculation speed etc. |