Modelling and Verification of Optical Landmark Navigation for Nanosatellite Star Trackers

This paper verifies a star tracker measurement model for optical navigation by estimating a spacecraft’s absolute navigation information from simulated optical data. Modified satellite images are used to simulate star tracker observations. Image-based line-of-sight (LOS) measurements are collected from the star tracker images. A least squares approach is used to find the satellite’s estimated position. The estimates were compared to the georeferenced locations of each star tracker image to find the localization errors. The estimated positions show 1 -sigma localization errors of 40 meters or better.