Neural Network Calibration of Star Trackers
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To maintain ideal performance, star trackers must be able to predict the direction of incident starlight to within a few arcseconds across the entire instrument field of view. Parametric camera models are commonly employed to calculate star vectors from camera images and correct for aberrations in the instrument optics. This conventional approach can be quite effective, but systematic errors can be difficult to eliminate and the proper selection of calibration basis functions is often difficult to determine. This study explores using supervised machine learning approaches such as Radial Basis Function networks (RBFNs) and Support Vector Machines (SVMs) for star tracker calibration as an alternative to conventional aberration formulations. These networks can be formulated either as a correction to a low-order camera model or complete replacement for the whole model. When applied to the instrument calibration of a dozen Sinclair Interplanetary ST-16RT2 sensors the RBFN formulation offers 27% reduction in the calibration residuals and almost 12% reduction in the validation residuals over conventional formulations.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it