3 ms·
Yes, there's one mentioned in the article, STELLA. Here's a paper describing it https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1999naos.symp..239K https://adsabs.harvard.edu/f
by cguess 2y ago
Yes, there's one mentioned in the article, STELLA. Here's a paper describing it https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1999naos.symp..239K https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1999naos.symp..239K
- tgsovlerkhgsel 2y agoThat's an amazing paper: TL;DR star tracking is a thoroughly solved problem, the hard problem is finding "where is down" without looking at the horizon (which may not be visible). The solution to that is coupling into the ship's inertial navigation system, which still may drift up to an arcminute per hour, but if you feed the star tracker data back into the INS for corrections, it gets better.
- giraffe_lady 2y agoIt's wild that the state of art on this is still basically how they left it at the end of the apollo program.
- zokier 2y agoNot sure how you reached that conclusion. The linked STELLA paper describes many post-Apollo improvements, both improvements implemented in STELLA, and star trackers like OWLS and AST 201. And it's not like progress stopped even there; the focus has been mostly on space exploration applications, but as the paper mentions the developments are somewhat applicable for terrestrial use too.