In-flight quality evaluation of attitude measurements from STECE APS-01 star tracker

•The STECE satellite mission of China is for space technology experiment and climate exploration.•The APS-01 star tracker has been loaded on the STECE satellite to test its in-flight performance.•The quality evaluation of APS-01 attitude measurement data has been carried out.•The random noise, the systematic bias and the low frequency errors of APS-01 have been characterized and assessed.

The STECE satellite is a small satellite mission of China for space technology experiment and climate exploration. To test the in-flight performance of the CMOS Active Pixel Sensor (APS) based star trackers, the APS-01 star tracker has been loaded on the STECE satellite. The APS-01 star tracker payload delivers 1 Hz real time telemetry attitude data during its in-orbit experiment mission. These attitude data have been analyzed and evaluated down to the specification requirements like random noise, systematic bias and low frequency error in this paper. The systematic bias of APS-01, including precession–nutation, aberration and relative installation error, has been calibrated. An approach is proposed to analyze the attitude low frequency errors of APS-01. The results of the evaluation can contribute to a better understanding as well as further refinements of the CMOS APS based star trackers.