Построитель местной вертикали для космического аппарата нанокласса

A device and a method for constructing local vertical for nanospacecraft based on the sight of the horizon of the Earth in the visible wavelength range are proposed. The use of such a system on the nanosatellite is reported to allow determination of the local vertical direction with accuracy comparable with the accuracy of infrared local vertical detectors, and also to provide significant gains in mass and power consumption. The disadvantages of the system include the inability to determine the orientation on the shady part of the orbit, as well as flashing of the image when struck by sunlight in the frame. Presented results of numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed system works in a wide range of orientation angles. A semi-natural experiment to determine the pitch angle by processing video images received from camera is carried out. Results of the experiment confirm that the accuracy of the developed system for constructing local vertical of spacecraft based on video processing is comparable to the precision provided by infrared detectors of local vertical.