Design, Implementation, and Operational Methodologies for Sub-arcsecond Attitude Determination, Control, and Stabilization of the Super-pressure Balloon-Borne Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT

Scientific balloon-borne instrumentation offers an attractive, competitive, and effective alternative to space-borne missions when considering the overall scope, cost, and development timescale required to design and launch scientific instruments. In particular, the balloon-borne environment provides a near-space regime that is suitable for a number of modern astronomical and cosmological experiments, where the atmospheric interference suffered by ground-based instrumentation is negligible at stratospheric altitudes. This work is centered around the analytical strategies and implementation considerations for the attitude determination and control of SuperBIT, a scientific balloon-borne payload capable of meeting the strict sub-arcsecond pointing and image stability requirements demanded by modern cosmological experiments. Broadly speaking, the designed stability specifications of SuperBIT coupled with its observational efficiency, image quality, and accessibility rivals state-of-the-art astronomical observatories such as the Hubble Space Telescope.;To this end, this work presents an end-to-end design methodology for precision pointing balloon-borne payloads such as SuperBIT within an analytical yet implementationally grounded context. Simulation models of SuperBIT are analytically derived to aid in pre-assembly trade-off and case studies that are pertinent to the dynamic balloon-borne environment. From these results, state estimation techniques and control methodologies are extensively developed, leveraging the analytical framework of simulation models and design studies. This pre-assembly design phase is physically validated during assembly, integration, and testing through implementation in real-time hardware and software, which bridges the gap between analytical results and practical application. SuperBIT attitude determination and control is demonstrated throughout two engineering test flights that verify pointing and image stability requirements in flight, where the post-flight results close the overall design loop by suggesting practical improvements to pre-design methodologies.;Overall, the analytical and practical results presented in this work, though centered around the SuperBIT project, provide generically useful and implementationally viable methodologies for high precision balloon-borne instrumentation, all of which are validated, justified, and improved both theoretically and practically. As such, the continuing development of SuperBIT, built from the work presented in this thesis, strives to further the potential for scientific balloon-borne astronomy in the near future.