The autonomous vision system on TeamSat

The second qualification flight of Ariane 5 blasted off-the European Space Port in French Guiana on October 30, 1997, carrying on board a small technology demonstration satellite called TeamSat. Several experiments were proposed by various universities and research institutions in Europe and five of them were finally selected and integrated into TeamSat, namely FIPEX, VTS, YES, ODD and the Autonomous Vision System, AVS, a fully autonomous star tracker and vision system. This paper gives short overview of the TeamSat satellite; design, implementation and mission objectives. AVS is described in more details. The main science objectives of the AVS were to verify, in space, multiple autonomous processes intended for spacecraft applications such as autonomous star identification and attitude determination, identification and tracking of non-stellar objects, imaging and real-time compression of image and science data for further ground analysis. AVS successfully determined the attitude and attitude dynamics of TeamSat.