Satellite Attitude Determination Using Absorbed Heat Fluxes

Attitude Reconstruction of a Spacecraft From Temperature Measurements in Solar Eclipse Analysis and Observer Design for a Not Globally Observable Non-Linear System

“…To simplify the analytic analysis, however, these dependencies are neglected as commonly assumed in literature, see e.g. [4], [8]. The function F denotes a form factor which models the irradiations between the spacecraft surface and the Earth.…”

“…2 )(t) = ( θ, θ1 , θ2 )(t). The considered temperature noise is chosen smaller than the ones expected from real measurements [8]. This is done for illustration purposes as simulations with these noise levels already yield high errors in the estimation but allow an identification of the error sources.…”

“…In comparison to these works, it is also investigated if the attitude can be estimated from temperature measurements assuming the position of the spacecraft is known. In [8], the heat flux of multiple temperature sensors orthogonal to each other is estimated and cast into a static non-linear system of equations which contains the attitude represented in Euler angles. This system is then solved using the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm in order to obtain the attitude.…”

“…The individual irradiations cannot be estimated using only three sensors as multiple attitudes can lead to the same sensor flux. Thus, [8] proposes to add an additional sensor in opposing direction to one of the existing sensors to solve this uniqueness issue. The recent work [9] uses three heat flow measurements to acquire the attitude estimation based on an unscented and extended Kalman filter.…”

Development of a radiation based heat model for satellite attitude determination

“…Within this framework, there are some recent studies involving utility of temperature data for flux computation as primary step in AD [28], where limitations, resolution and accuracies of thermal data for heat flux determination are analyzed. Heat flux for AD is proposed in [29], where a basic Levenberg-Marquardt [30]. Moreover, experimental validation of the proposed HAM has been investigated [31], where a cubic laboratory satellite is used for testing within a vacuum chamber lit by a Sun simulator.…”