Ricerc@Sapienza

The interest in determining the attitude of an orbiting object has grown significantly in recent years. Besides being one of the key parameters needed to obtain a precise orbital determination, the attitude is also crucial in the perspective of planning a space debris removing mission. In this paper, we present a method to retrieve the attitude of an orbiting object, based on a virtual reality simulation together with a global optimization. The attitude will be determined using the object's lightcurve derived information, i.e. the total reflected light variation in time.

LEDSAT is a 1U CubeSat developed by S5Lab team of Sapienza – University of Rome in collaboration with the Astronomy Department of University of Michigan. The main goal of the mission is to demonstrate that a LED-based active illumination system may be used to achieve orbit and attitude determination. LEDSAT will be placed into a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and observed by a network of ground-based telescopes. A LED-based system may improve the accuracy in monitoring LEO spacecraft.

The paper describes a method based on virtual reality tools to achieve the attitude determination of an orbiting object using lightcurve measurements. A virtual model of the orbiting object is propagated in order to reproduce its lightcurve. The differences between the real and simulated lightcurves is used as the cost function to be minimized through a multiobjective genetic algorithm. Lightcurve measurements in different spectral bands, both with monostatic and multistatic optical observations can be used.