Attitude determination and control system for the Nano-JASMINE mission

Nano-JASMINE (Nano-Japan Astrometry Satellite Mission for INfrared Exploration) is a nano astrometry satellite developed at the ISSL, University of Tokyo. The mission objective is to measure the positions of stars to accuracy of 1.8 milli-arcsecond (mas). In order to obtain accurate astrometry data, the satellite should be stabilized to better than 4 × 10−7 rad/s, which is difficult to achieve using only conventional sensors. In Nano-JASMINE mission, the attitude will be determined by assessing the quality of the star image observed with the mission telescope. In this research, sequence of each attitude control mode and how to estimate angular velocity in observation phase is focused on. Based on simulation results, the research concludes that the use of star blurred image data to estimate attitude information is a feasible method for use on the Nano-JASMINE mission.