Attitude Maneuvering Sequence Design of High-Precision Ground Target Tracking Control for Multispectral Earth Observations

Abstract

Microsatellites, weigh less than 100 kg attract attention due to recent growth of space business. Space Robotic Laboratory (SRL) of Tohoku University is currently developing a 50-kg-class Earth observation microsatellite RISESAT, and it is planned to be launched in 2019. RISESAT is equipped with 680 bands and 4 m resolution multispectral Earth observation system which is world's highest performance regardless of satellite size. To carry out the observation, RISESAT has to track a ground target with an accuracy of 0.1°. In this paper, we propose attitude maneuver sequence design which enables high-precision and reliable attitude determination by star trackers. Spiral scan algorithm to enlarge observation area is also derived. Evaluations of the algorithm were carried out by a simulator "MEYIμS" which is a Hardware-In-the-Loop Simulation (HILS) environment developed by SRL. We confirm that the algorithm satisfies the mission requirements under the influence of sensor noise and computation time limits.