Novel Approach to Determine Spinning Satellites’ Attitude by RCS Measurements

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel approach for determining the three-dimensional (3D) attitude of on-orbit satellites in a spin condition using radar cross-section (RCS) measurements. The core idea of the approach lies in the matching process between the RCS real measurement sequences and the simulated sequences implemented using the mean square error (MSE) optimization rule. In this manner, the attitude determination problem is transformed into the optimization problem solved by minimizing the matching function. A hybrid particle swarm optimization (HPSO) algorithm is developed to precisely solve the optimization problem. The simulation and real measurements are used to verify the algorithm in the experiments. The numerical results prove the correctness of the proposal and demonstrate the better performance of HPSO than conventional particle swarm optimization (PSO) in terms of accuracy. The accuracy and antinoise ability of the proposed method to determinate spinning satellites’ attitude are verified by processing the RCS real measurement data of the PS-1A satellite.