Development of a Star Tracker System for Distributed Navigation

Abstract

A star tracker consists of a camera connected to a computer. Using images of the sky, stars can be identified. Based on observations of particular stars at a known time, the orientation of the platform can be computed. A star tracker performs pattern recognition on the stars in the camera field of view to calculate the attitude of the platform with respect to celestial coordinates. In this thesis, the authors go one step further and convert celestial coordinates to Earth-center-Earth-fixed (ECEF) coordinates. To facilitate an investigation of star tracker technology applied to Earth-based navigation, a science-ready sky simulator was developed using the underlying mathematical techniques utilized by the star tracker software. Both Lost in Space and Tracking mode pipelines were developed based on current state of the art algorithms. The fully integrated star tracker system was then tested with a miniscope setup.