On-Orbit Alignment between Star Trackers and an Optical Telescope with Application to the Asteroid Finder Satellite

Abstract

The work presented in this paper concerns the on-orbit alignment between an optical telescope and star trackers, with an application to the Asteroid Finder mission. The presented work utilizes the background stars which appear in the telescope �eld of view (FOV) to get more accurate attitude information and to better align the star trackers with the telescope. The on- orbit alignment between the telescope coordinate frame and the star trackers' coordinate frames should be determined to within tenths of an arcsecond in order to achieve the required precision in the attitude of the measured stars in the telescope FOV. The measured raw star data from the telescope charge- coupled device (CCD) at di�erent measurement frequencies will also be used for the further spacecraft attitude improvement.