A Novel Attitude Representation in View of Spacecraft Attitude Reconstruction using Temperature Data

Abstract There are various different attitude representations that describe the orientation of a rigid body in space and allow the transformation between different coordinate systems. Among others, they differ in number of variables, uniqueness of the representation and their continuity. However, in spite of some of them being based on angles, none of them constitutes a simple representation of an angle between two arbitrary vectors. We tackle this issue by proposing a novel attitude representation that directly incorporates the desired angle. The usefulness of this representation is demonstrated in the attitude reconstruction from temperature data, which then leads to an order reduction of a non-linear system.