Satellite Attitude from a Raven Class Telescope
Abstract
Photometric signatures of satellites collected from small aperture optical systems have the potential of providing valuable satellite information including operational status and attitude. Low cost, small aperture systems provide the capability to be transportable and therefore used in a wide variety of deployment scenarios. This research describes the benefits of prior knowledge of the satellite under consideration including general size, shape and typical material properties. By constraining the problem to a discrete set of satellite attitudes, curve matching algorithms can then be used to compare the measured photometric signature against those in the forward modeled database. TASAT simulations were used to create a database of forward modeled photometric signatures. In this paper, we explore two curve matching techniques. The first method was Kendall's Tau which compares the shapes of two curves. The second method was the Spectral Angle Mapper (SAM) which measures the similarity of two curves that have been processed to remove their mean values. The key findings of this study are the generation of a database of signatures to which a measured signal can be compared to extract attitude information about the satellite during a specific pass.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 01, 2010
- Accession Number
- ADA531741
Entities
People
- Daron Nishimoto
- David Archambeault
- David Gerwe
- Paul Kervin
Organizations
- Air Force Research Laboratory