Aerospace Instrument-Making Annotation << Back ORIENT ALGORITHM FOR SPACECRAFT ATTITUDE ESTIMATION FROM STAR SENSOR MEASUREMENTS I.V. Solovyev This paper presents a novel single-point algorithm of the optimal spacecraft attitude es-timation from simultaneous vector observations, specifically from star sensor measure-ments. The algorithm is based on the new approximate solution to the Wahba problem using the Gibbs vector estimation from the simple system of three linear equations. Due to high accuracy of the modern star sensors the largest eigenvalue of the Davenport’s K-matrix with properly chosen weights is extremely close to unity, which allows to simplify the problem and to eliminate the iterative computations. The performance of the algorithm is compared with that of the most efficient current algorithms of the attitude determination (QUEST, ESOQ, ESOQ2, and FOAM) with the same initial data. The results of comparative tests demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm in computational efficiency and the equality in accuracy which is common to all the solutions of the Wahba problem. These properties make it possible to use the proposed algorithm in the onboard software of the spacecraft attitude determination and control systems. Key words: attitude determination, star sensor. Contacts: E-mail: i.solovieff@yandex.ru Pp. 11-19.