Session
Technical Session XII: Year in Review
Abstract
The first launch of a pair of 90 gram Sinclair Interplanetary ST-16 star trackers was in November, 2013 on-board the Skybox Imaging SkySat-1 satellite. The sensor performance — as captured by the sensors’ availability, accuracy, and bad-match rate — fell significantly below expectations. This paper explores the flight qualification campaign undertaken by the sensor developers to bring the sensors back to their intended level of performance. No single fix was sufficient and many small incremental improvements were necessary for success. We discuss the fault diagnosis procedures employed by the team and highlight some of the key improvements to star detection, star measurement, rate estimation, and catalog generation algorithms. Presently the ST-16 sensors on Skysat-1 are reporting availability of around 98% and cross-axis accuracies of roughly 10 arcseconds over an entire orbit in a nominal Earth-observing attitude.
Success by 1000 Improvements: Flight Qualification of the ST-16 Star Tracker
The first launch of a pair of 90 gram Sinclair Interplanetary ST-16 star trackers was in November, 2013 on-board the Skybox Imaging SkySat-1 satellite. The sensor performance — as captured by the sensors’ availability, accuracy, and bad-match rate — fell significantly below expectations. This paper explores the flight qualification campaign undertaken by the sensor developers to bring the sensors back to their intended level of performance. No single fix was sufficient and many small incremental improvements were necessary for success. We discuss the fault diagnosis procedures employed by the team and highlight some of the key improvements to star detection, star measurement, rate estimation, and catalog generation algorithms. Presently the ST-16 sensors on Skysat-1 are reporting availability of around 98% and cross-axis accuracies of roughly 10 arcseconds over an entire orbit in a nominal Earth-observing attitude.
