In-flight Alignment Calibration of a Space Telescope with a Star Tracker Cluster
Yevgeny Somov, Sergey Butyrin
For high-accuracy pointing an orbital telescope (OT) line-of-sight onto observed objects and fulfilling programs of scanning the Earth surface, it is required that the relative position of reference frames connected with an orbital telescope and the star trackers (STs) is precisely determined. The elaborated method for solving this problem is based on onboard processing of the information obtained at scanning the star sky simultaneously by the OT and the STs. To define positions of the OT, each ST and the star tracker cluster with high precision, we apply the multiply digital filtration of measurement, polynomial approximation and the vector spline extrapolation of the quaternion values for the OT and ST attitude in the inertial reference frame. The accuracy estimates obtained are presented.