Optical navigation of small spacecraft swarm in stack arrangement during deployment
Abstract:
Among space mission with multi-satellite constellation, there is an increasing usage of flattened spacecraft, such as communication satellites or femtosatellites placed on printed circuit board. The spacecraft group can be assembled using «stack» method during launch into orbit. In this paper, problem of such spacecrafts motion determination using video processing from camera of chief spacecraft or booster unit is explored. The video is captured after deputy spacecrafts deployment. Various methods are considered for spacecraft position determination and analyzed using numerical modeling.
