Building a modular CubeSat tracking system that will use a Kalman filter to estimate the CubeSats’ relative position using data from two optical sensors, then estimate the CubeSats’ inertial orbit and estimate two-line elements (TLEs).
Our ConOps displays everything VISION will accomplish in black. There are no plans for our payload to go to space, however our sponsor has plans to iterate on the design with the end goal of selling a commercial orbit determination system for deployers such as the ISS or Rocket Lab.
Similar form factor to a 3U CubeSat, mounted on the exterior to not impact the number of CubeSats that can be deployed.
ToF (Time of Flight) camera as well as a monochrome camera are used to determine the trajectory of the CubeSats and a GPS receiver determines the position of the payload. This information is combined to predict the inertial orbit of the CubeSats.
Blender used to generate animations for any deployment scenario, animation then loaded into Blensor to generate point cloud data for the video.
This video shows a different perspective of the point clouds for the deployment seen above. Three distinct CubeSats can be seen (one 3U and two 1U), and our code determines the centroid for each CubeSat for the duration of data collection.
