Design and implementation of a star-tracker for LEO satellite

An important task of the attitude determination and control subsystem (ADCS) is the determination of attitude of the satellite in reference to the Earth or any other planetary and correct any deviation from the expected attitude. In order to determine the attitude of the satellite, sensors are needed to sense the orientation of the satellite. The star-tracker is able to determine the attitude from the view field of the star set without any prior knowledge of sensor information. In this paper, the design, simulation and implementation of a star-tracker is presented for LEO satellites. For capturing image data, the MT9P031 CMOS image sensor from Aptina Imaging was used. The star tracker uses a Texas Instrument OMAP3530 using an ARM Cortex A8. The processor supports powerful graphic interfaces resulting in reduction of the size and consumption power of the star-tracker. For storage and processing, the star tracker used NAND flash memory. The communication interface to the satellite is done through CAN Bus. One of the key features of this sensor is processing various algorithms for image processing, positioning, and tracking according to mission requirements. Quaternion estimator (QUEST) algorithm was utilized for positioning. The tracking algorithm utilizes information from the previous frame of the star-tracking. This algorithm is a high-speed, low cost, and low memory implementation. In the field tests, the identification success rate of this system was 96.81 %.