Toward a fault-tolerant star tracker for small satellite applications

Abstract

Star trackers are autonomous, high-accuracy electronic systems used to determine the attitude of a spacecraft. In recent years, commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS)-based star trackers are growing in importance for low-cost and short-duration missions, but their fault tolerance against soft errors has not been studied in detail. In this paper, we propose a self-healing system protected with ad hoc techniques that can be used as the first step to implement a fault-tolerant COTS-based star tracker for smallsat applications.