Optical tracking and orbit determination performance of self-illuminated small spacecraft: LEDSAT (LED-based SATellite)

LEDSAT is a 1U CubeSat developed by S5Lab team of Sapienza – University of Rome in collaboration with the Astronomy Department of University of Michigan. The main goal of the mission is to demonstrate that a LED-based active illumination system may be used to achieve orbit and attitude determination. LEDSAT will be placed into a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and observed by a network of ground-based telescopes. A LED-based system may improve the accuracy in monitoring LEO spacecraft. A simple model is developed to estimate the features of an optical link between a ground station and a self-illumination system. The reliability of orbit determination and the precision of the orbit reconstruction is evaluated.