Processing of Meteosat attitude measurement flight data and evaluation of the performance of an adaptive filtering technique

The attitude measurement data of the ESA geosynchronous spacecraft METEOSAT have been analyzed using an adaptive recursive filtering technique developed at NLR. The mathematical models of spacecraft dynamics and sensors have been kept very simple. Modelling errors are such that, without adaptive feed-back, strong divergence of the filtering...

Accurate spacecraft attitude estimation with the ESA starmapper

The ESA starmapper is an optical-electronic instrument with an array of photo-sensitive slits, to "be strapped down to spinning spacecraft. Recorded times of passage of known stars over these slits, together with mathematical models for spacecraft dynamics and starmapper instrument, provide the basis for recursive estimation of the spacecraft...