The determination of the attitude and attitude dynamics of TeamSat

The second qualification flight of Ariane 5 was launched from the European Space Port in French Guiana on October 30, 1997. It carried on board a smal l technology demonstration satellite dubbed TeamSat into which five experim ents, proposed by various universities and research institutions, were inte grated. Among them, the Autonomous Vision System, AVS, a fully autonomous s tar tracker and vision system. This paper gives a short overview of the Tea mSat satellite design, implementation and mission objectives. The AVS is de scribed in more details. The main science objectives of the AVS were to ver ify, in space, multiple autonomous processes intended for spacecraft applic ations such as autonomous star identification, attitude determination and i dentification and tracking of non-stellar objects, imaging and real-time co mpression of image and science data for further ground analysis, AVS succes sfully determined the attitude and attitude dynamics of TeamSat. (C) 2000 E lsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.