Design of the High Altitude Balloon Experiment Line-of-Sight Stabilization and Pointing System

Dave Anderson and Marcus Schulthess, Henry Sebesta, John Blackbum, and Steve Baugh

Abstract:	The High Altitude Balloon Experiment (HABE) is being developed to collect data, validate enabling technologies, and resolve critcal aquisition, tracking and pointing (ATP) and fire control issues in support of future space-based precision pointing systems. The use of high-altitude balloons to host ATP experiment payloads provides a low-cost low-vibration, globally deployable test bed which is recoverable and reusable. The balloon takes the payload to “near-space” environments and provides realistic test conditions for future space systems operational equipment and procedues. The HABE platform design is based on several previous spacecraft designs and includes coarse gimbal pointing, infrared and visible passive tracking, active fine tracking, internal auto-alignment and bore-sighting, and precision line-of-sight (LOS) stabiiization functions. An inertial sensorbased LOS stabilization function is a critical requirement in high precision ATP systems. In its completed design configuration, the HABE will integrate and fly the Inertial Pseudo Star Reference Unit (IPSRU) for the purpose of achieving requisite LOS stability needed to engage targets at long ranges. During early HABE flights, the gimbal stabilization and LOS control will be implemented with a surrogate IPSRU. In the surrogate implementation, a stable optical alignment reference beam is created by using measurements from strapped down inertial sensors and a high bandwidth steering mirror to stabilize an optical reference for the payload. This paper describes the HABE LOS stabilization and pointing system design and its predicted performance in the surrogate and final IPSRU configurations.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of The Institute of Navigation (1993) June 21 - 23, 1993 Royal Sonesta Hotel Cambridge, MA
Pages:	735 - 746
Cite this article:	Anderson, Dave, Schulthess, Marcus, Sebesta, Henry, Blackbum, John, Baugh, Steve, "Design of the High Altitude Balloon Experiment Line-of-Sight Stabilization and Pointing System," Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of The Institute of Navigation (1993), Cambridge, MA, June 1993, pp. 735-746.
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