An economical and highly accurate attitude and position determination system for airborne polarimetric sensors

Abstract

An economical and highly accurate Attitude and Position Determination System (APDS) has been investigated for aircraft polarimetric science. The trend towards smaller and less expensive aircraft platforms makes such a system attractive and cost efficient. The list price is a fraction of the cost of popular gyroscope based systems typically used for attitude determination, but with comparable attitude accuracy. The APDS incorporates four GPS antennas in a baseline configuration that, when coupled with horn mounted inclinometers for ground based alignment, and resolvers on the positioning system, achieves a system angular accuracy of better than +/- 0.07/spl deg/, and positional information to better than 10 meters. Additionally, GPS time tagging and velocity information is available.