Star Tracker Geometric Calibration Through Full-State Estimation Including Attitude

Abstract

A star tracker calibration method using star images is presented in this paper. Unlike previous works, the proposed method estimates all parameters and the attitudes at once in a single least-squares formulation for the optimal calibration, which can be easily converted to a recursive estimation form. In addition, this paper presents a method to estimate the overall star tracker performance for attitude determination from the calibration results. Since the proposed method uses star images only, it can be applied to both on-orbit and ground star tracker calibration. The simulations show improvements in calibration performance about four times compared to the previous calibration method. The calibration experiments with actual star images are conducted to test its application.