Satellite Attitude Determination with Low-Cost Sensors.

Abstract

This dissertation contributes design and data processing techniques to maximize the accuracy of low-cost attitude determination systems while removing pre-flight calibration requirements. This enables rapid development of small spacecraft to perform increasingly complex missions. The focus of this work is magnetometers and sun sensors, which are the two most common types of attitude sensors.

Magnetometer measurements are degraded by the magnetic fields of nearby electronics, which traditionally limit their utility on satellites unless a boom is used to provide physical separation between the magnetometer and the satellite. This dissertation presents an on-orbit, attitude-independent method for magnetometer calibration that mitigates the effect of nearby electronics. With this method, magnetometers can be placed anywhere within the spacecraft, and as demonstrated through application to flight data, the accuracy of the integrated magnetometer is reduced to nearly that of the stand-alone magnetometer.

Photodiodes are light sensors that can be used for sun sensing. An individual photodiode provides a measurement of a single sun vector component, and since orthogonal photodiodes do not provide sufficient coverage due to photodiode field-of-view limitations, there is a tradeoff between photodiode orientation and sun sensing angular accuracy. This dissertation presents a design method to optimize the photodiode configuration for sun sensing, which is also generally applicable to directional sensors. Additionally, an on-orbit calibration method is developed to estimate the photodiode scale factors and orientation, which are critical for accurate sun sensing.

Combined, these methods allow a magnetometer to be placed anywhere within a spacecraft and provide an optimal design technique for photodiode placement. On-orbit calibration methods are formulated for both types of sensors that correct the sensor errors on-orbit without requiring pre-flight calibration. The calibration methods are demonstrated by application to on-orbit data, and attitude determination accuracies of 0.5 degrees 1-sigma are achieved with commercial-off-the-shelf magnetometers, photodiodes, and a MEMS rate gyroscope, which to the author's knowledge, is the best accuracy reported in the literature for this class of sensors.