In most spacecraft, there is a need to know the craft's angular rate. Approaches with least squares and an adaptive Kalman filter are proposed for estimating the angular rate directly from the star tracker measurements. In these approaches, only knowledge of the vector measurements and sampling interval is required. The designed adaptive Kalman filter can filter out noise without information of the dynamic model and inertia dyadic. To verify the proposed estimation approaches, simulations based on the orbit data of the challenging minisatellite payload (CHAMP) satellite and experimental tests with night-sky observation are performed. Both the simulations and experimental testing results have demonstrated that the proposed approach performs well in terms of accuracy, robustness, and performance.

Star pattern recognition and attitude determination accuracy is highly dependent on star spot location accuracy for the star tracker. A star spot location estimation approach with the Kalman filter for a star tracker has been proposed, which consists of three steps. In the proposed approach, the approximate locations of the star spots in successive frames are predicted first; then the measurement star spot locations are achieved by defining a series of small windows around each predictive star spot location. Finally, the star spot locations are updated by the designed Kalman filter. To confirm the proposed star spot location estimation approach, the simulations based on the orbit data of the CHAMP satellite and the real guide star catalog are performed. The simulation results indicate that the proposed approach can filter out noises from the measurements remarkably if the sampling frequency is sufficient.

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