ESA GNC Conference Papers Repository

Line Of Sight (LOS) Stabilization techniques are a strategic topic, as they enable high pointing performance missions and can provide strategic relaxation to platform stability requirements leading to major cost reductions. The maturity of space industry allows the development of standard platforms that are now more and more often considered as commodity and subject to rationalization and cost reductions. In such a context, the concept of hosted payload is becoming a standardized approach and the development of active line of sight concepts part of the payload becomes central. This work presents the results of two activities led by Thales Alenia Space, under ESA contracts 4000133400/20/NL/CRS and 4000126060/18/NL/FE, that address the line of sight stabilization system using inertial and digital approaches. The first part of the work presents the design and performance assessment of a digital stabilization system for a multispectral imaging mission from GEO orbit. Digital stabilization consists in splitting the integration time into smaller windows, acquiring a set of image frames that are registered and combined to form a reconstructed image. Under certain conditions, image resolution can be improved by a process called multi-frame super-resolution. The method performance is assessed, and its sensitivity to the main design drivers is derived. The performance is shown to be compliant to the requirements over a variety of conditions (illumination conditions, SNR, scene types, etc.). The second part of the paper presents a LEO push-broom interferometer agile mission implementing inertial based opto-mechanical stabilization. The paper presents the design and the main results obtained in the study, that confirmed the interest of the stabilization system for such a mission. A dedicated breadboard allowed validating the approach and increasing the maturity of the system. A performance assessment campaign confirmed the stability improvement obtained in simulation.