Design & development of a prototype star tracker using Raspberry Pi

• Main Author: Lee, Yuan Heng
• Other Authors: Chen Shoushun
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/71180
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Star trackers are a crucial device on any satellite. They are necessary to determine the orientation of the spacecraft and to navigate through space. A star tracker is essentially, a camera and a small computer that measures the relative position of stars. The camera capture images of the star and the computer identify the stars in the captured image to determine the attitude based on the identified stars. Star trackers is widely popular because of its accuracy as an attitude determination method and its fully autonomous mode. Raspberry Pi is easily available on the commercial market. The use of Raspberry Pi allows the possibility to build a small and light star tracker that consume low power than conventional ones, making it an important factors for microsatellite applications. In this project, the main focus will be on implementing the star identification Liebe algorithms on Raspberry Pi to identify the stars. Performance of the algorithm will be investigated and a simulation will be performed to investigate the ability of the algorithms.