Attitude determination strategy based on kalman filter for the sport cubesat science mission

Resumo

© 2020, Univelt Inc. All rights reserved.In this work, an attitude determination algorithm was developed for the 6U CubeSat satellite model of the Scintillation Prediction Observation Research Task (SPORT) mission. The project is a cooperation among the US Space Agency (NASA), American universities, the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) and the Aeronautics Institute of Technology (ITA). The work includes obtaining data from star, solar, magnetometer and gyro sensors and, with them to carry out, the attitude estimation. One of the requirements of the mission is the accuracy of attitude determination, which is only satisfied by the star sensor. However, there are periods in which the star sensor does not have valid measures, therefore, there is a need to study methods to improve the attitude given by the solar sensor and magnetometer. Thus, the TRIAD algorithm, in addition to the Kalman Filter, were analyzed to achieve the most accurate result within the established requirement. It was concluded that when the star sensor does not present valid measures, the analyzed case that fulfilled the requirements was the Kalman Filter with the TRIAD algorithm.