Performance improvement of low-cost star-tracker simulator via image distortion compensation

The star-tracker is the most precise on-board attitude sensor for satellites to measure the attitude. In our laboratory, we are currently developing a low-cost star-tracker simulator for verifying an attitude determination algorithm. Severe performance degradation in attitude determination is observed due to lens distortion of the camera and alignment distortion between the camera and the monitor. How to compensate these distortions to improve the attitude determination accuracy without fixing of devices is the major concern of this paper. We proposed distortion compensation algorithms and experimentally showed the performance improvement in the determination accuracy of the star-tracker algorithm.