Design And Implementation Of An Attitude Determination Software System Based On Star Sensor

In recent years, the aviation and space industry and navigation technology ispositively developing around the world. There is a great demand for autonomousnavigation technology. Because of the naturality of distribution, stars are important andreliable observed object for autonomous navigation. Using stars as reference, attitudedetermination system based on the star sensor is a kind of autonomous navigation systemwith important value, and has high measurement accuracy of space attitude.This paper studied and realized the attitude determination software for a star sensor.Based on the analysis, summary and compare of existing technology memtioned inrelevant monographs and literature, and combining the actual demand of the project, thispaper introduced the architecture, working principle and the implementation of the mainmodule of the system. The optical system of star sensor photographed the stars, then thesystem pick up the the effective stars in the field of view, by star pattern recognition andattitude determination, we can get the orientation of the optical axis of star sensor, anddetermine the attitude of the spacecraft accordingly. This paper designed an improvedtriangle star pattern matching algorithm and corresponding navigational stars library, andselect the the QUEST algorithm as attitude determination algorithm after comparing andstudying the effect of several algorithm in the system.We tested the implementation and effect of the system through the host computer.The results show that the Success rate of star pattern recognition was97.5%, and the resultof attitude determination accurated to8arc seconds through the QUEST algorithm. Thissoftware system meets the requirements of the project.