A study on estimation of spin motion of decommissioned spacecraft using visual tracking

抄録

In recent years, there is a large category of space-debris including decommissioned spacecraft on the earth orbit. It has become a severe problem in the field of space engineering because they might cause a serious crash to spacecraft. Therefore, it is an urgent problem that we need to retrieve or remove the decommissioned spacecraft on the earth orbit as soon as possible. To do that, it is an inevitable technique to specify the precise motion of the spacecraft. In this study, we aimed to propose a new method to specify the motion of decommissioned spacecraft based on real-time movies taken from other spacecraft.

The problems to be solved in this research are roughly divided into two. One is to accurately track and estimate the attitude motion of the target spacecraft. It is established by tracing the motion trajectory of the feature points of the target spacecraft on the captured image. The other problem is to estimate the three-dimensional attitude motion of the target spacecraft from the two-dimensional captured image.

In this paper, we propose a robust motion estimation method using Optical Flow to track the motion of the feature point of the target spacecraft, and Kalman Filter to estimate the 3D motion spacecraft, assuming that the motion of the target spacecraft is pure-spin. We report the results of numerical examples.