Spacecraft Optical Navigation E-Book

William M. Owen

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Serie: JPL Deep-Space Communications and Navigation Series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 182

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

UNIQUE RESOURCE EXPLORING HOW SPACECRAFT IMAGERY PROVIDES PROFESSIONALS WITH ACCURATE ESTIMATES OF SPACECRAFT TRAJECTORY, WITH REAL-WORLD EXAMPLES AND DETAILED ILLUSTRATIONS

Spacecraft Optical Navigation provides detailed information on the planning and analysis of spacecraft imagery to help determine the trajectory of a spacecraft. The author, an experienced engineer within the field, addresses the entirety of celestial targets and explains how a spacecraft captures their imagery.

Aimed at professionals within spacecraft navigation, this book provides an extensive introduction and explains the history of optical navigation, reviewing a range of optical methods and presents real world examples throughout. With the use of mathematics, this book discusses everything from the orbits, sizes, and shapes of the bodies being imaged, to the location and properties of salient features on their surfaces.

Specific sample topics covered in Spacecraft Optical Navigation include:

• History of various past spacecraft, including Mariner and Viking, Voyager, Galileo, NEAR Shoemaker, and Cassini, and flight hardware, star catalogs, and stereophotoclinometry
• Cameras, covering the gnomonic projection (and deviations from it), creation of a digital picture, picture flattening, and readout smears
• Modeling optical navigation observables, covering apparent directions to an object, star, and limbs or terminators, and orientation of cameras
• Obtaining optical navigation observables, covering centerfinding for stars and resolved and unresolved bodies, and using opnav data in orbit determination

Spacecraft Optical Navigation is an ideal resource for engineers working in spacecraft navigation and optical navigation, to update their knowledge of the technology and use it in their day-to-day. The text will also benefit researchers working with spacecraft, particularly in navigation, and professors and lecturers teaching graduate aerospace courses.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

List of Figures

Preface

Acknowledgement

1 Introduction

1.1 Purpose

1.2 Definitions

1.3 Notation

1.4 Rotations

1.5 Left-handed Coordinate Systems

Note

2 History

2.1 The Early Years: Mariner and Viking

2.2 Coming of Age: Voyager

2.3 Innovation and Workarounds: Galileo

2.4 Landmarks: NEAR Shoemaker

2.5 Maturity: Cassini

2.6 Autonomy: Deep Space 1, Stardust, Deep Impact

2.7 Flight Hardware

2.8 Development of Enabling Technologies

2.9 Star Catalogs

2.10 Stereophotoclinometry

2.11 Future Missions

2.12 Optical Navigation Outside JPL

2.13 Summary

Notes

3 Cameras

3.1 The Gnomonic Projection

3.2 Deviations from the Gnomonic Projection

3.3 The Creation of a Digital Picture

3.4 Picture Flattening

3.5 Readout Smear

4 Modeling Optical Navigation Observables

4.1 Introduction

4.2 The Apparent Direction to an Object

4.3 The Apparent Direction to a Star

4.4 The Apparent Direction to the Limb or Terminator

4.5 The Orientation of the Camera

4.6 Modeling the Gnomonic Projection

4.7 Modeling Distortions and Misalignments

4.8 Conversion into Pixel Coordinates

4.9 Summary of Optical Navigation Geometry Calculations

5 Obtaining Optical Navigation Observables

5.1 Introduction

5.2 Centerfinding for Stars

5.3 Reflectance Laws

5.4 Centerfinding for Unresolved Bodies

5.5 Centerfinding for Resolved Bodies

5.6 Centerfinding for Landmarks

Note

6 Using Opnav Data in Orbit Determination

6.1 Dynamic Partials

6.2 Star Partials

6.3 Optical Partials

6.4 Constructing the List of Estimated Parameters

6.5 Camera Calibration

Appendix A: Appendix AThe Overlapping Plate Method

A.1 Development of Fundamental Catalogs

A.2 The Astrographic Catalog

A.3 Development of the Overlapping Plate Method

A.4 Application to Groundbased Astrometry

Glossary

References

Further Reading

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

Chapter 1

Figure 1.1 A right-handed coordinate system.

Figure 1.2 Rotation about the -axis, by .

Figure 1.3 Rotation about the -axis, by .

Figure 1.4 Rotation about the -axis, by .

Figure 1.5 First rotation in a 3–1–3 sequence, by about the -axis. The da...

Figure 1.6 Second rotation in a 3–1–3 sequence by , about the new -axis. T...

Figure 1.7 Third rotation in a 3–1–3 sequence, by about the final -axis....

Chapter 2

Figure 2.1 Mariner 1969 picture of Mars.

Figure 2.2 Tom Duxbury and Chuck Acton receiving the Samuel M. Burka award....

Figure 2.3 Galileo “single-frame mosaic” picture of Gaspra.

Figure 2.4 A Galileo opnav picture, showing only those pixels which were tra...

Figure 2.5 NEAR Shoemaker opnav picture, showing landmark D0008.

Chapter 3

Figure 3.1 A camera obscura creating an image of the outside scene against t...

Figure 3.2 Instrumental effects in a Vidicon picture. This is a long exposur...

Figure 3.3 New Horizons picture of Jupiter, showing the effects of two-sided...

Figure 3.4 The same picture as in Figure 3.3, after desmearing.

Figure 3.5 The same picture as in Figure 3.3, after desmearing, at high cont...

Chapter 5

Figure 5.1 Incidence, emission, and phase angles, with vectors pointing towa...

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Series Page

Title Page

Copyright

List of Figures

Preface

Acknowledgement

Begin Reading

Appendix A The Overlapping Plate Method

Glossary

References

Index

WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT

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DEEP SPACE COMMUNICATIONS AND NAVIGATION SERIES

Issued by the Deep Space Communications and Navigation Systems

Center of Excellence, Jet Propulsion Laboratory

California Institute of Technology

Jon Hamkins, Editor-in-Chief

Published Titles in this Series

Radiometric Tracking Techniques for Deep-Space NavigationCatherine L. Thornton and James S. Border

Formulation for Observed and Computed Values of Deep Space Network Data Types for NavigationTheodore D. Moyer

Bandwidth-Efficient Digital Modulation with Application to Deep-Space CommunicationsMarvin K. Simon

Large Antennas of the Deep Space NetworkWilliam A. Imbriale

Antenna Arraying Techniques in the Deep Space NetworkDavid H. Rogstad, Alexander Mileant, and Timothy T. Pham

Radio Occultations Using Earth Satellites: A Wave Theory TreatmentWilliam G. Melbourne

Deep Space Optical CommunicationsHamid Hemmati, Editor

Spaceborne Antennas for Planetary ExplorationWilliam A. Imbriale, Editor

Autonomous Software-Defined Radio Receivers for Deep Space ApplicationsJon Hamkins and Marvin K. Simon, Editors

Low-Noise Systems in the Deep Space NetworkMacgregor S. Reid, Editor

Coupled-Oscillator Based Active-Array AntennasRonald J. Pogorzelski and Apostolos Georgiadis

Low-Energy Lunar Trajectory DesignJeffrey S. Parker and Rodney L. Anderson

Deep Space CommunicationsJim Taylor, Editor

Radio Science Techniques for Deep Space ExplorationSami W. Asmar

Spacecraft Optical NavigationWilliam M. Owen Jr.

Spacecraft Optical Navigation

William M. Owen Jr.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory

California Institute of Technology

California, USA

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for:

Hardback ISBN: 9781119904434

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List of Figures

Figure 1.1  A right-handed coordinate system.

Figure 1.2  Rotation about the -axis, by .

Figure 1.3  Rotation about the -axis, by .

Figure 1.4  Rotation about the -axis, by .

Figure 1.5  First rotation in a 3–1–3 sequence, by about the -axis. The dashed lines represent the original - and -axes.

Figure 1.6  Second rotation in a 3–1–3 sequence by , about the new -axis. The original - and -axes now appear as dotted lines; the original -axis and the -axis (i.e. after the first rotation) are dashed lines. Note that as the -axis points into the page, a positive rotation appears to be clockwise from the reader’s point of view.

Figure 1.7  Third rotation in a 3–1–3 sequence, by about the final -axis.

Figure 2.1  Mariner 1969 picture of Mars.

Figure 2.2  Tom Duxbury and Chuck Acton receiving the Samuel M. Burka award.

Figure 2.3  Galileo “single-frame mosaic” picture of Gaspra.

Figure 2.4  A Galileo opnav picture, showing only those pixels which were transmitted to the ground.

Figure 2.5  NEAR Shoemaker opnav picture, showing landmark D0008.

Figure 3.1  A camera obscura creating an image of the outside scene against the back wall.

Figure 3.2  Instrumental effects in a Vidicon picture. This is a long exposure of Neptune from Voyager 2’s narrow-angle camera. Triton is the bright object at lower right. Six stars are also visible.

Figure 3.3  New Horizons picture of Jupiter, showing the effects of two-sided readout smear (Owen, Weaver and Cheng 2019).

Figure 3.4  The same picture as in Figure 3.3, after desmearing.

Figure 3.5  The same picture as in Figure 3.3, after desmearing, at high contrast.

Figure 5.1  Incidence, emission, and phase angles, with vectors pointing toward the sun, the camera, and the normal to the surface.

Preface

The book which you, my dear reader, are now holding in your hands represents not only the summation of the author’s 40-year career at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory but also the accumulated wisdom, gained from experience, of many of my past and current colleagues. A brief autobiography may help provide some context for the rest of the material.

I was in high school when Mariners 6 and 7 flew past Mars and just out of college when the Vikings landed on it. I came to JPL in December 1979, after the Voyagers’ encounters with Jupiter and before they flew past Saturn. I hired into what was then called the Optical Measurements Analysis Group, and they set me to work finding opportunities for optical navigation pictures for Galileo. At that time launch was scheduled for 1982, with a flyby of Mars, and I led a small effort to improve the positions of stars behind Mars before the flyby. (I still have some plates taken by the 48-inch Schmidt telescope at Palomar.) The launch slipped, and that work went for naught.

By 1985 I was finally supporting Voyager, not in operations but rather in star catalog development. Before the HIPPARCOS mission, the newest catalogs had been produced by the Yale University Observatory in the 1930s, and the uncertainties in the stars’ proper motion had rendered their positions obsolete. The Voyager project, for each encounter, had a contract with Lick Observatory (by then managed by the University of California, Santa Cruz) to take glass plates, measure the stars on them, reduce the data, and produce an ad hoc catalog. Their state-of-the-art measuring engine was controlled by a PDP-8 minicomputer, but their setup required approximate plate coordinates for each image to be measured. A “survey machine,” also connected to that computer, would project a small part of a plate onto a screen. There were crosshairs on the screen, a joystick to move the plate around, and a button (on a rack over to the side) labeled RECORD. I shall leave the rest of it to the reader’s imagination. Suffice it to say that I surveyed eight plates for Uranus and enjoyed the experience so much that I repeated it for Neptune and for Galileo’s flybys of Gaspra and Ida.

Changes to Voyager’s approach sequence, coupled with a realization that the operations team could actually perform their tasks faster than originally planned, permitted us to schedule a few more late pictures. Those background stars lay outside the region we had catalogued, and I found myself writing to Southern Hemisphere observatories to request positions for these stars. The replies invariably began “Dear Dr. Owen,” and not willing to make liars out of them, I went to grad school in fall 1986, studying astrometry under Heinrich Eichhorn, escaping just in time to support the Neptune flyby.

Since that time I have supported just about every mission that required optical navigation: Galileo (to a limited extent), Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (later renamed NEAR Shoemaker), Cassini, Deep Space 1, Stardust, Deep Impact, and New Horizons. I have also played a small role in some European missions, most notably Rosetta.

In the early 1990s I participated in some advanced studies to figure out how spacecraft navigation would work in the era of optical communication. Radio tracking data, so important for so many years, would be supplanted by a combination of LIDAR-style ranging and good old-fashioned optical astrometry, because a downlink laser would look just like a star in a telescope. We therefore started a groundbased astrometry campaign, first to characterize the instrument and camera, then to obtain data for the Galilean and Saturnian satellites, Mathilde and Eros, all in support of Galileo, Cassini, and NEAR. Our observations of Mathilde moved its orbit by something like eight standard deviations, a result that of course met with some resistance. David Dunham, now retired from APL but still active in the International Occultation Timing Association, was on NEAR’s mission design team. He asked us for astrometry for one particular asteroid, (170) Maria, that was about to occult a star. We obliged, the predicted path of the occultation moved by 10 times its width, and someone in the revised path watched the event. This success gave the NEAR team the courage to accept our Mathilde astrometry, which also turned out to be correct.

The experience with Maria and Mathilde was the genesis of a collaboration with IOTA that would last twenty years.

All good things must end, so they say, and as I enter retirement it behooves me to thank all those who have helped me along the way:

my supervisors, Ken Rourke, Tom Duxbury, and especially Steve Synnott;

my graduate advisor, Heinrich Eichhorn, who taught this know-it-all even more than I thought possible;

my many optical navigation colleagues over the years, particularly Ed Riedel, Bob Gaskell, and Nick Mastrodemos;

my current management team, Ralph Roncoli and Tung-Han You, who have been holding my feet to the fire;

David Berry, Bill Taber, and Dimitrios Gerasimatos, who provided financial support; and finally

Richard Waldo Hambleton, my grandfather, who woke me up in the middle of one March night in 1960 to show me an eclipse of the moon.

Thank you, all of you.

Acknowledgement

The research described in this book was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Copyright © 2021 California Institute of Technology. Government sponsorship acknowledged.

1Introduction

1.1 Purpose

This book attempts to describe the discipline of spacecraft observation, as practiced at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) since the late 1960s and more recently elsewhere. It is not intended to be a user’s guide for JPL software, nor a mathematical models document describing the functionality of JPL software, nor a requirements document. Rather, it is meant to be more of a textbook treating all aspects of optical navigation: predicting the contents of pictures, analyzing the pictures to extract the observables, and introducing these observations into a solution for navigation parameters. Discussions of cameras and detectors are included as well, but only in enough depth that a navigation engineer can understand the properties of the hardware.

Chapter 2 contains the history of optical navigation, both at JPL and elsewhere. Chapter 3 discusses cameras, including their optics and detectors, from the point of view of an optical navigation engineer. Chapter 4 presents the mathematics required to predict where the image of some object or star will appear in a picture. Chapter 5, the longest and most diverse, discusses various methods of extracting observed image locations from the brightness levels in a received picture. Chapter 6 deals with the incorporation of optical data into an orbit determination solutions. Appendix treats the “overlapping plate method,” which enables accurate camera calibration even though its original purpose was for the development of star catalogs. A glossary of terms and references for each chapter are also presented.

1.2 Definitions

Optical navigation is the use of pictures, taken by cameras aboard spacecraft, to help determine the trajectory of the spacecraft. A camera in this context means some instrument that projects incoming light onto a detector to form a picture of the scene being imaged. The picture consists of a rectangular array of pixels, each of which contains a digital number or DN value that ideally is linearly proportional to the number of photons impinging upon a corresponding rectangular region of the detector. The picture may therefore contain images of stars, natural bodies, or even other spacecraft. Landmarks are specific features or points on the surface of a body, and images of landmarks are also used in navigation.

The fundamental coordinate system is the International Celestial Reference Frame or ICRF, currently defined at optical wavelengths by the coordinates of stars in the HIPPARCOS catalog (European Space Agency 1997). This frame’s -axis is closely aligned with the direction of the Earth’s mean vernal equinox at epoch January 1, 2000 12:00:00 barycentric dynamical time (TDB), and its -axis is closely aligned with the Earth’s mean north pole at the same epoch. The origin is the barycenter of the Solar System. Star catalogs and ephemerides of Solar System bodies used in optical navigation operations are presumed to be referred to the ICRF as well.

1.3 Notation

Throughout this book, scalars are set in italic type, vectors in boldface roman, and matrices in uppercase sans-serif. Terms specific to astronomy, optics, or optical navigation appear in slanted type at their first occurrence.

1.4 Rotations

Rotations are to be thought of as rotating a coordinate system, rather than as a change in the orientation of (say) a vector. A rotation matrix is a matrix that, when multiplying a vector, transforms its rectangular coordinates from one coordinate system to another. An “elementary” rotation by angle about axis is denoted as . Written out in full,

(1.1a)

(1.1b)

(1.1c)

Figure 1.1 shows a typical right-handed Cartesian coordinate system, whose axes are denoted by , , and . Figures 1.2–1.4 show the result after a rotation of about each of the three axes. The dotted circle in each of these figures represents the plane in which the rotation takes place—in other words, the plane which is perpendicular to the axis of rotation.

Figure 1.1 A right-handed coordinate system.

Figure 1.2 Rotation about the -axis, by .

Figure 1.3 Rotation about the -axis, by .

Figure 1.4 Rotation about the -axis, by .

A positive rotation about the -axis moves the -axis toward and the -axis toward .

A positive rotation about the -axis moves the -axis toward and the -axis toward .

A positive rotation about the -axis moves the -axis toward and the -axis toward .

If a vector has rectangular coordinates that are expressed in some coordinate system , the rotation matrix will transform the coordinates into those of some other coordinate system by

(1.2)

The physical direction of the vector does not change under this operation. Its rectangular components, however, will in general change as a result of the change of coordinate system. The length of the vector is also unchanged, as the determinant of a rotation matrix is 1.

Rotation matrices may be strung together, one multiplying the next, to produce a new matrix which will also be a rotation. Three elementary rotations suffice to generate any arbitrary rotation. Matrix multiplication is associative but not commutative, and so the order in which the rotations are carried out is important. Figures 1.5–1.7 provide an example of a “3–1–3” sequence of rotations. The first rotation establishes the line of intersection between the initial and final – planes, the second gives the dihedral angle between these two planes (thereby establishing the final -axis), and the third locates the final - and -axes. For example, if the final plane is the plane of an orbit, the three angles would be, in order, the longitude or right ascension1 of the ascending node, the inclination, and the argument of pericenter.