Patent — available for licensing
Low Cost Star Tracker Software
A NASA invention available to explore as a licensing opportunity.
About this technology
Overview
A star tracker or similar navigation device is needed for a Small Spacecraft, to provide highly accurate attitude information and to determine location and velocity vectors. NASA has developed a novel technology, a star tracker, as part of its extremely low cost commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware project. It uses relatively low power, is highly accurate, and is relatively inexpensive, uses an iterative pattern matching approach to identify a star configuration and associated spatial viewing direction in a database that corresponds to an observed star configuration. Orientation of a star configuration is confirmed by comparison of measured angular differences with angular differences contained in a database. Star configurations viewed from a polyhedrron defined by two, three, four or more non-coincident planes can be used to estimate a three-dimensional viewing direction of the polyhedron.