Star Visibility Analysis for a Low Earth Orbit Satellite

Recently, star sensors have been successfully used as main attitude sensors for attitude control in many satellites. This research presents the star visibility analysis for star trackers and the goal of this analysis is to make sure that the star tracker implementation is suitable to the mission profile and scenario and satisfies the requirement of attitude orbit control system. As a main optical attitude sensor imaging stars, accomodations of a star tracker should be optimized in order to improve the probability of the usage by avoiding the blinding (the unavailability) by the Sun and the Earth. For the analysis, a statistical approach and a time simulation approach are used. The statistical approach is based on the generation of numerous cases, to derive relevant statistics about Earth and Sun proximity probabilites for different lines of sight. The time simulation approach is performed for one orbit to check the statistical result and to refine the statistical result and accomodations of star trackers. In order to perform simulations first of all, an orbit and specific mission profiles of a satellite are set, next the earth proximity probability and the sun proximity probability are calculated by considering the attitude maneuvers and the geometry of the orbit, and then finally the unavailability positions are estimated. As a result, the optimized accomodations of two star trackers are suggested for the low earth orbit satellite.