Satellite celestial navigation using star-tracker and earth sensor

Abstract

In this paper, a satellite celestial navigation which estimates the satellite position on the orbit is proposed. It consists attitude sensor with star-tracker and earth sensor. The proposed algorithm is based on the theory that the position on the surface is determined in the case of having a different observation angle for each star at zenith. The performance of the proposed algorithm is examined via simulation considering error parameters of attitude sensor. The proposed satellite celestial navigation algorithm can estimate the satellite position on the orbit in real time, since it obtains the observation angle and altitude directly by using the attitude sensor.