The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
May. 22, 2001
Filed:
Mar. 03, 1999
Yeong-Wei A. Wu, Rancho Palos Verdes, CA (US);
Douglas H. Hein, Los Angeles, CA (US);
Garry Didinsky, Niles, IL (US);
David L. Augenstein, Hermosa Beach, CA (US);
Hughes Electronics Corporation, El Segundo, CA (US);
Abstract
High precision spacecraft attitude determination is produced by specially positioning the spacecraft's star trackers and then filtering out measurement errors produced from star tracker electronics. In addition to the conventional azimuth and elevation controls used for star tracker pointing, the star tracker detector array is rotationally positioned about its boresight so that its pixels are traversed by the imaged star path at an angle within 20° of diagonal. This forces both vertical and horizontal spatial error components in the detector plane to a high frequency range at which they can easily be filtered out in common.