Master of Science (MS), Ohio University, 2008, Electrical Engineering (Engineering and Technology)

Satellite laser communication systems provide measurements that can be further processed to provide relative attitude estimates of each satellite in the constellation. This suggests a dual-use potential yielding benefits such as the use of lower-cost inertial measurement units, achieving improved fault-tolerance, and facilitating the implementation of orbital control systems. This thesis presents a static attitude determination scheme that provides relative attitude estimates using azimuth and elevation angles provided by the laser communication system. These measurements are corrupted by noise and error sources, several of which are characterized herein, and so this thesis also presents a sensitivity analysis intended to characterize the impact that these errors have on the attitude solution. This analysis reveals a high degree of sensitivity which indicates that a dynamic attitude estimation scheme may be required that incorporates the static estimation scheme in a nonlinear filtering architecture.

Committee: Douglas A. Lawrence PhD (Committee Chair); Maarten Uijt de Haag PhD (Committee Member); Sergiu Aizicovici PhD (Committee Member); Robert Williams II PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Electrical Engineering