Development Of A Test Equipment For The Star Sensor

Star Sensor is a kind of high precision aerospace attitude determinationequipment, which realizes determination of attitude by contrasting the captured starimage with the navigation star database. The performance of Star Sensor affects theproperties of aerospace attitude determination. The test equipment of Star Sensor isa kind of instrument aims to debugging the Star Sensor, which means greatimportance in the producing process. This thesis researches a test equipment of StarSensor to make a comprehensive detection of Star Sensor, which serves thedevelopment, debug and produce process.The thesis designed a kind of measurement and control platform whichincludes programmable power supply, data capturing device and PCI-basedindustrial control computer on the base of detailed analysis the requirement oftesting Star Sensor, which follows the trend of technology development. Theplatform completed the capture of image from the Star Sensor, the1553B-basedtiming communication and the RS-422-based asynchronous serial communicationas well as the monitoring of state of power supply for the Star Sensor. On the aspectof hardware design, data capturing device is introduced, which accomplished theacquirement of real-time image of Star Sensor and the communication with thecontrol computer, the receiving of one channel of RS-422differential image signalwhich was stored in CF card. At the same time, the1553B-based communicationmodel was used to complete the telecommunication with Star Sensor based on1553B standard, the RS-422-based communication model was used to receiveRS-422signal. On the other hand, the aspect of software, a program to test the1553B order reaction performance of Star Sensor was designed, which appliesmultithread and Excel object library in LabWindows/CVI; a program of real-timeimage capturing was developed to receive and analyze the star map and a programof serial signal acquiring was created to receive and analyze asynchronousdifferential signal. A method to control programmable power supply based on VISAand SCPI was introduced as well. The software use VISA, Excel Object Library andMultithread to complete the measure and analysis of Star Sensor, the scalability and transportability of the software was also considered.The test equipment was able to monitor the state of star Sensor and discover thefaults of Star Sensor in the design process, which satisfied the demand andcompleted the test mission after the actual test along with Star Sensor.