Toward a Stellar Gyroscope for Spacecraft Attitude Determination

Abstract

A stellar gyroscope is a star tracker that can operate at high slew rates and high update rates. Stellar gyro-scopes can potentially eliminate the need for conventional inertial gyros onboard a spacecraft and will eventually revolutionize attitude determination systems on all spacecraft. A conceptual design of a stellar gyroscope will be presented along with simulations of the stellar gyroscope performance. The simulations show that it is feasible to make spacecraft attitude determination relying exclusively on stellar gyroscopes. It is projected that the stellar gyroscope will be able to determine slew rates up to 420 deg/s and will be able to determine the absolute attitude at slew rates up to 50 deg/s.