On-Orbit Alignment between the Star Tracker and the Asteroid/Finder Instrument

Chhabilal Adhikari
c.adhikari@jacobs-university.de Smart Systems Jacobs University Bremen Campus Ring 1 28759 Bremen Germany

Type: Master Thesis Proposal Date: January 6, 2012 Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Peter Baumann, Jacobs University Bremen Dr. Malak Samaan, German Aerospace Center, Bremen

Executive Summary
AsteroidFinder is a technically challenging, scientically fascinating and low-budget space mission. By operating at the cutting edge of present research, AsteroidFinder will greatly increase our knowledge of Inner Earth Objects (IEOs) and of NearEarth Objects (NEOs) in general. It will help us to better quantify the asteroidal impact risk for the Earth. The scientic goal of Asteroid/Finder instrument is to detect and characterize NEO. However the background stars which appear in the telescope eld of view (FOV) could be used to get more attitude information and also to better align the star trackers. The alignment requirement between the Altitude Control System (ACS) star trackers and the Asteroid Finder Instrument (AFI) is necessary to perform the stability requirement. The ACS will utilize the centroids of the imaged stars in the telescope FOV in order to perform the on-orbit alignment (Calibration). This allows an on-orbit alignment between star cameras and telescope. Moreover, the AFI could be used as an additional attitude sensor. In this case, this concept will lead to the reduction of the total number of the on-board star trackers heads from four to two. The AFI should provide the instantaneous guide star centroids (positions) in the charge coupled device (CCD) reference frame to the Standard Satellite Bus (SSB) ACS at the individual exposure frame rate of the AFI.

Introduction

The AsteroidFinder is a scientic mission whose primary goal is to detect Inner Earth Objects (IEOs). The payload consists of a space born optical telescope, a Focal Plane Array and a Digital Processing Unit (DPU) mounted on the DLR compact satellite bus SSB ying in a Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The instrument requirements that drive the design of the instrument are the limiting magnitude, the astrometric accuracy and the eld of view (FOV) of the telescope. The goal of the project is to develop, implement and test the ight software for utilizing the Asteroid Finder Instrument (AFI) as an additional accurate star tracker. The on-orbit alignment/calibration between the AFI coordinate frame and the Star trackers coordinate frame will also be investigated and implemented. In order to proof these concepts, the simulation of the inputs from the AFI and the star trackers for a specied mission scenario shall be the rst goal of this work. The ight software should be implemented, integrated and tested in the whole ACS software. In detail the master thesis aims to address the following: 1. Specify the detailed measurements requirement from the AFI. 2. Identify the suitable data interfaces and format with the AFI output. 3. Simulate the measurements of the AFI and the star trackers for any mission scenario. 4. Develop an algorithm to utilize the AFI outputs as an additional source for attitude determination with the help of an on-orbit star catalogue. 5. Implement and optimize the developed algorithm in order to achieve the best accuracy from the AFI as a star tracker. 6. Develop an on-orbit algorithm to align/calibrate the AFI frame with respect to the star trackers frames in a specied frequency. 7. Implement and optimize the alignment algorithm with the simulated measurements. 8. Test both algorithms with the simulated measurements and with the data provided by the AFI with the interfaces specied in 2. 9. Implement and integrate the nal software/code in the whole ACS software chain. 10. Investigate the option of extracting the angular rates from the AFI measurements at different frequencies.

Statement and Motivation of Research

Minor bodies of the Solar System played a crucial role in the formation of the planets and the development of life. Asteroids and comets are thought to be remnant material from the process of formation and the initial development of planets. Due to their peculiar dynamical and physical properties, such as small size, lack of a permanent atmosphere, and relatively little thermal processing, these objects have remained largely unaltered since their accretion and are, therefore, witnesses of the formation of the Solar System. Furthermore, their dynamical evolution is a tracer of the mass distribution in the early planetary system. Nearly 5700 NEOs have been detected by end of September 2008. The fraction of the small body population in Earth-crossing orbits constitutes a hazard since these bodies can eventually collide with Earth with potentially devastating consequences for civilization. NEOs are dynamically close to the Earth and are, therefore, well accessible by spacecrafts. They constitute an extraterrestrial resource of diverse compositions that can be exploited in the future. The recognition of the scientic value of small bodies and their non-negligible impact risk has been fully realized in the last decades. An armada of satellites has been developed and launched to explore asteroids and comets (VEGA, GIOTTO, ROSETTA, DEEP IMPACT, DS1, STARDUST, NEAR-Shoemaker, Hayabusa, DAWN) [3]. The identication of structures on the Moon by the Apollo missions as being scars from impacts during its geologic history opened the eyes for the impact risk on Earth. Further evidence came from investigations of terrestrial craters and the possible connection to mass extinctions, such as the K-T event some 65 millions years ago. While it is rather clear that the current risk is quite small, it is not negligible and it is important to identify most of the potentially hazardous bodies well in advance of their possible impact opportunities. Therefore, starting in the late nineties of the last century dedicated ground-based astronomical search activities were initiated, primarily in the U.S., in order to detect and characterize a major fraction of the larger (bigger than 1 km in diameter) near-Earth objects. (NEOs). These quite successful programs revealed some of the characteristics of the NEO population, in particular its size-frequency distribution, orbital properties and, in combination with studies of impact craters on the Moon, allowed estimates of the impact frequency on the Earth. However, one special population of NEOs, the Inner Earth Objects (IEOs) whose orbits are completely within the Earth orbit, is particularly hard to detect from ground. Because of their low solar elongation they are only observable shortly after sunset or just before sunrise, in analogy to the planets Mercury and Venus. Up to now only 9 objects have been detected whereas more than 1000 larger than 100 m are predicted by models. A compact satellite mission equipped with an optical telescope represents an appropriate tool to discover these objects from an Earth orbits. A secondary goal of this payload is to demonstrate the detectability of space debris from an Earth orbit. The steadily increasing number of space objects poses a considerable hazard to all kinds of 3

spacecraft. The rst step for the mitigation of this risk is the creation of a catalog of these objects. Up to date about 13000 pieces have been detected, but according to model calculations several hundreds of thousands debris larger than 1 cm are expected to orbit the Earth. The Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) of the United Nations (UN) supports the international activities to study and detect NEOs and space debris. The German Aerospace Center, Bremen (DLR) is represented in this committee. The work started already in 2002 with the EARTHGUARD-1 project studied by Kayser-Threde and DLR for European Space Agency (ESA). The main goals of AF are to discover IEOs and other NEOs and to determine their orbits and to demonstrate that space debris can be detected from orbit with a compact satellite. It is very challenging to reach the described goals with a compact satellite mission but is feasible by using a 25 cmclass telescope and by achieving the demanding pointing stability requirements by using modern technology concepts on payload level. Presently, there is only one other mission worldwide, NEOSSat (Hildebrand, 2006), with similar objectives under consideration initiated by the Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) [5]. However, this mission has been designed with a telescope of a smaller aperture and with the goal to achieve the pointing stability on bus level [3]. Currently, the Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC) department of DLR is developing technologies for guidance, navigation and control of space vehicles and is applying these technologies to different projects and missions. The development activities include the research on algorithms, software and hardware. One of these activities in the GNC department is the design and development of the attitude control subsystem for the Asteroid/Finder satellite. Asteroid/Finder is a compact satellite that will be used for detecting asteroids with an optical payload (telescope). Especially the objects that are completely inside the Earth orbit are of interest. The task of detecting weak light sources like asteroids places challenging requirements to the Attitude Control System (ACS). Therefore the Asteroid/Finder needs to be stabilised and controlled by an active three axes ACS. For the attitude determination, one star tracker DPU (Digital Processing Unit) connected with two CHU (Camera Head Unit) will be used to provide the attitude in the 3-axes.

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3.1

Planned Investigation
Mechanical Conguration/Attachment I/F

Two CHUs are used for the AsteroidFinder. They are attached to the AsteroidFinder Instrument (AFI). The CHUs itself are mounted onto a bracket, which is build by Kaiser Threde and this bracket is mounted onto the telescope structure. The arrangement of the star tracker boresight is shown in Figure 1. The CHU-A boresight normal (Z STR1) is aligned parallel to the telescope boresight normal (Z PEF), 4

Figure 1: Arrangement of CHUs inside the AsteroidFinder while the CHU-B boresight (Z STR2) is tilted 63 degree away into the forbidden zone [4].

3.2

Initial Simulation

In the AFI On-Board star catalog selection document many different statistics are simulated and calculated in order to choose the best On-Board star catalog to be used for the Asteroid Finder Instrument (AFI). This Catalog is used to identify the imaged stars within the AFI eld of view and to carryout the alignment procedure between the attitude star tracker and the AFI. The following table summarize many statistics for several star catalog based on different magnitude threshold (from 7.0 to 14.0). The Hipparcos star catalog with total magnitude threshold of about 14.0 is used in the calculation. The initial simulation is based on the initial quaternion and Asteroid Finder Attitude prole (along the telescope, which implies the same quaternion parameter along the camera head unit 1 (Z CHU1). The output of the

simulation is of the sky observed with the CCD as shown in Figure 2. The parameters for simulation of eld of view images for the Astroid Finder Telescope:

Figure 2: Simulation of the virtual sky that CCD should observe. The eld of view (FOV) is calculated as following (in degree): F OV = 2 a tan( nx psx 180 ) 2 f ocal pi

Where, nx is the number of pixels (x is for vertical), psx is the pixel size and focal is the focal length in mm.

Current simulation result based on the following: Maximum Energy (Grey tone [magnitude -1.5]), m0=-1.5 and Emax=70000 Number of pixels (vertical), nx=2024 and Number of pixels (horizental), ny=2024 Pixel size, psx=12e-3; psy=12e-3 and Field of View (FOV) = 2.0768 Focal Length (mm), focal= 670 and Maximum number of imaged stars, nsmax=10 Number of catalog stars = 34971, Number of points= 8641 (nearly equal to 1.5 period) Result, Percentage of number of star 3 is = 59.0209% Figure 3 is the plot of quaternions attitude prole for the Asteroid Finder and

Figure 3: Asteroid Finder Attitude quaternion plot.

Figure 4: Asteroid Finder single Attitude quaternion-q1 plot. Figure 4 is the plot of single quaternion altitude prole (q1). 7

Figure 5: Occurrence versus number of stars

Figure 6: Plot of the magnitude Figure 5 is the plot of occurence versus number of stars and Figure 6 is the plot of the magnitude.

Figure 7: Plot of the histogram

Figure 8: Simulation of movement of the star tracker telescope. Figure 7 is the plot of the histogram and Figure 8 is the movement of the star tracker telescope from one cetroidal position to the other

3.3

On-Orbit Alignment Algorithm

The CHU-B boresight (Z CHU2) is tilted 63 degree away into the forbidden zone as shown in Figure 1. The rotation matrix about x-axis corresponding to this orientation is: 1 0 0 Rx (63) = 0 cos(63) sin(63) 0 sin(63) cos(63) The SSB-ACS will be equipped with one -Advanced Stellar Compass (ASC) from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) [8]. It is build up out of four camera head units (CHU) and one data processing unit (DPU) which is internally redundant. Two camera heads will be placed parallel to the telescope instruments line of sight and the others will be placed with a deviation angle to the rst one. This angle is chosen in such a way that the camera head is not exposed to direct sunlight during normal operation. The available led of view (FOV) of each CHU is 18.4 degree x 12.4 degree. The simulation with increased FOV results the following: FOV = 19.1064, n cat star = 34971 and npoints = 8641. The new quaternion values are computed with the rotation matrix above (rotation along x-axis with 63 degree angle) [9]. The result of occurence versus number of stars is shown in Figure 9 and the percentage of number of star 3 is was found to be 52.1815%.

Figure 9: Occurrence versus number of stars

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The altitude is represented by a rotation matrix Q and the camera coordinate system. Let (Xcent, Ycent, f) be the coordinates of a star center in the image (where f is the focal length). The direction of this star is given by the unit vector: x Xcent 1 Y cent xu = y = Xcent2 + Y cent2 + f 2 z f Now, the quaternions about the unit vector in the direction of the star is computed with the rotation angle of 63 degree as follows: q0 cos(63/2) q sin(63/2)x q = 1 = q2 sin(63/2)y q3 sin(63/2)z TBC

The Testing Environment

The ight software to be developed and implemented would utilize the AFI as an additional accurate star tracker. The on-orbit alignment/calibration between the AFI coordinate frame and the Star trackers coordinate frame would be investigated and implemented. In order to proof and test these concepts, I will simulate the inputs from the AFI and the star trackers for a specied mission scenario.

Timeline

I would like to briey outline a tentative timeline for the proposed project in the grant chart:

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Sept-11

Oct-11

Nov-11

Dec-11

Jan-12

Feb-12

Mar-12

Apr-12

May-12

Jun-12

1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5

Preliminary study

Literature Review 1

Break

Literature Review 2

Implementation of Rotation

Break

Milestone 1- Thesis Proposal Skeleton

Milestone 2- Final Thesis Proposal

Research and Implementation phase

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Milestone 3: Finish thesis draft

Milestone 4: Thesis Presentation

Milestone 4: Thesis Final report

Algorithm Optimization

Publication

References
1. Samaan M. A., Toward Faster and More Accurate Star Sensors using Recursive Centroiding and Star Identication- A Dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Texas A&M University, USA, August 2003. http://repository.tamu.edu/bitstream/handle/1969.1/ 433/etd-tamu-2003B-2003060911-Sama-1.pdf?sequence=1 2. Samaan M. A., On-Orbit Alignment between the Star Tracker and the Asteroid/Finder Instrument, Master Thesis task description document, German Aerospace Center (DLR), August 2011. 3. AsteroidFinder Payload Phase A/A Report, German Aerospace Center (DLR), 2010. 4. Compact Satellite AsteroidFinder Interface Control Document, Star Tracker, German Aerospace Center (DLR), 21 MAR 2011. 5. NEOSSat Canadas Sentinel in the Skies, http://www.asc-csa.gc. ca/eng/satellites/neossat/, December 2011. 6. Project AsteroidFinder Phase A, Altitude Control System (ACS), Preliminary Design Document, German Aerospace Center (DLR), 2009. 7. Asteroid Finder Instrument (AFI) On-Board Star Catalog Selection Document, German Aerospace Center (DLR), 2010. 8. The micro-Advanced Stellar Compass ASC, A fully autonomous star tracker, A technical summary from Denmark Technical University (DTU), http: //www.newworldt.com/download/DTU/microASC%20Summary. pdf. 9. Ed. by. James R. Wertz, Kluwer Academic Publisher, Spacecraft Attitude Determination and Control, Euler Symmetric Parameters and Quaternions, Page. 414 and Appendix D, 1990.

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