Attitude Determination with Self-Inspection Cameras Repurposed as Earth Horizon Sensors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Attitude determination for small satellites is a vital aspect of spacecraft operations. Earth Horizon Sensor(s) (EHS) are one of many sensors used in on-orbit attitude estimation. A conventional EHS captures infrared images of the Earth’s horizon and estimates the nadir vector in the spacecraft body frame, using the Earth’s curvature and prior knowledge of the spacecraft’s orbit. However, the design and test of new sensors increase mission cost and development time, while some spacecraft may not be able to accommodate such dedicated sensors. Therefore, it is beneficial if existing onboard optical sensors could be repurposed as effective EHS. The Space Flight Laboratory has previously designed and launched the NorSat-2 spacecraft, equipped with the Miniature Vehicle Inspection Camera (mVIC) for antenna deployment inspection. This paper proposes a generalized nadir vector estimation methodology using simulation images from an optical sensor such as the mVIC, which was not originally designed as an EHS. Nadir vector estimation accuracy with software-generated sensor images is discussed and demonstrates the viability of the mVIC to be used as an EHS.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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) | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.007 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".