Attitude Reconstruction of a Spacecraft from Temperature Measurements in Solar Eclipse

Abstract

This article proposes a method that uses only a single temperature measurement and angular velocity measurements to estimate the attitude of a spacecraft under the influence of solely infrared irradiation. The system governing the dynamics is highly non-linear with its attitude being defined in the quaternion space. The resulting observability mapping is used to transform the system into a canonical observability form. However, this mapping is not bijective, and a method to find the arising local inverses is proposed. The reconstruction algorithm itself is divided into two separate parts and uses the canonical form. The first part carries out the dynamic estimation of the temperature and its derivatives. The second part uses these derivatives to estimate the attitude by solving a system of non-linear equations. The proposed algorithm achieves the desired results under the assumption that a suitable initial guess of the attitude is available. Numerical simulations show the validity of the algorithm and illustrate errors induced by measurement noise.