Accurate and High Frequency Event-based Star Tracking
As Earth’s orbits grow increasingly crowded with satellites, debris, and other space assets, the demand for faster and more motion-tolerant guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) systems is rising. Traditional star trackers—used for attitude determination in spacecraft—rely on optical sensors that struggle under high-dynamic conditions and introduce latency that limits their performance.
This webinar explores a next-generation solution: event-based sensors (EBS) paired with Kitware’s advanced event-processing algorithms. Unlike conventional frame-based systems, EBS detect changes in a scene as they occur, enabling ultra-low-latency and high-frequency attitude updates—even during rapid motion or vibration.
Join us to learn how Kitware’s algorithms provide precise star centroiding in real-time and deliver motion-tolerant star tracking that outperforms conventional methods. We’ll showcase direct comparisons with legacy star trackers and demonstrate how this technology can also support broader space domain awareness applications, such as monitoring objects and debris in orbit.
Whether you’re building spaceflight systems, designing new GNC pipelines, or exploring event-based vision for aerospace applications, this webinar will provide practical insights and performance data on the benefits of this emerging sensing modality.
During this webinar, Kitware’s experts will:
- Introduce event-based sensing, a new modality of optical sensor that we apply to star tracking.
- Describe the shortcomings of existing star trackers that follow from limitations of conventional optical sensing.
- Motivate the need for event-specific centroiding algorithms to accurately determine the location of star centroids.
- Demonstrate the benefits of EBS star tracking by comparison to a conventional star tracker, quantifying increases in temporal resolution and motion tolerance.
- Discuss how an EBS star tracker can be used to monitor earth’s orbit for other space objects, including space debris.
from the industry experts on Accurate and High Frequency Event-based Star Tracking!