Micro-Satellite Attitude Determination Using GPS Carrier Phases

GPS is an attractive attitude sensor for micro-satellites due to small package and advantage for cost savings. However, the major difficulty in attitude determination for a micro-satellite is that baseline lengths are short (less than a meter) . Thus , to obtain precise accuracy of attitudes for a micro-satellite, the algorithm selection and error source calibration are important. In this paper, a technique based on the attitude cost function is proposed. To verify the method proposed, the experiments have been conducted. The results indicate that attitude errors are less than 1 deg.