A novel vision-based approach for autonomous space navigation systems

Determining the attitude of a satellite is a crucial problem in autonomous space navigation. Actual systems exploit ensemble of sensors, also relying on star trackers, that recover the attitude of a satellite through matching part of the sky map with a star atlas stored on board. These are very complex systems that even suffer for Sun and Moon blinding. In this work we assess the feasibility to use a novel stand-alone system relying on a camera looking at the Earth. The satellite attitude is recovered through the parameters extracted from the registration of the image pairs acquired while orbiting. The experiments confirms that the accuracy of our approach is fully compliant with the application requirements.