Attitude recovery from feature tracking for estimating angular rate of non-cooperative spacecraft

This paper presents a fault-tolerant method for estimating the angular rate of uncontrolled bodies in space, such as failed spacecraft. The bodies are assumed to be free of any sensors; however, a planned mission is assumed to track several features of the object by means of stereo-vision sensors. Tracking bodies in the space environment using these sensors is not, in general, an easy task: obtainable information regarding the attitude of the body is often corrupted or partial. The developed method exploits this partial information to completely recover the attitude of the body using a basis pursuit approach. An unscented Kalman filter can then be used to estimate the angular rate of the body.