Determining a spacecraft attitude motion by measurements of a star sensor and an angular rate sensor

We describe an application of Kalman’s filter in the problem of determining a spacecraft attitude motion by measurements of a star sensor and an angular rate sensor. We consider two variants of this problem. The first variant deals with star sensor measurements solely; the second one uses essentially angular rate measurements. The solutions of these variants are illustrated by examples of determining the real attitude motion of the spacecraft Meteor-M.