Design and Simulation of a High-Speed Star Tracker for Direct Optical Feedback Control in ADCS.

Area of Science:

• Aerospace Engineering
• Spacecraft Attitude Determination and Control

Background:

• Star trackers are crucial for spacecraft attitude determination but often have slow update rates.
• Existing rate gyros are either noisy or too heavy and expensive for many applications.

Purpose of the Study:

• Investigate the feasibility of high-speed star trackers using modern components.
• Develop and evaluate a high-speed star tracker algorithm suitable for FPGA implementation.
• Assess the system's performance and compatibility with CubeSat missions.

Main Methods:

• Analyzed the sensitivity of an optoelectrical acquisition system for dim star detection.
• Designed and evaluated a high-speed algorithm for Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) implementation.
• Tested the FPGA implementation's performance, including update rate and latency.

Main Results:

• Achieved 0.001° accuracy with 99.1% sky coverage.
• Demonstrated a 50 Hz update rate with a 19 ms total delay.
• Successfully rejected false positives during single-frame lost-in-space star identification.

Conclusions:

• High-speed star trackers can enhance Attitude Determination and Control Systems (ADCS) performance.
• The proposed system can eliminate the need for rate gyros.
• The technology is suitable for CubeSat ecosystems and advanced space missions.