Abstract
Most people who have had even the most casual contact with spacecraft (no, not a Close Encounter of the First Kind) have heard the term “orbit” used and have at least a rough idea of what the word means. By contrast, the first time you hear the phrase “attitude determination” or “attitude control” a whole host of rather exotic images may cross your mind, for example Michael Caine’s portrayal of Harry Palmer in the movie The Ipcress File. In some respects, these impressions are not totally far-fetched, and there are some similarities between psychiatry and spacecraft attitude control. Although the field of psychoanalysis is possessed of a rich literature documenting its knowledge and a host of psychoanalytical techniques for analyzing a subject have been established, it is difficult even for a talented psychiatrist to determine in the short-term a subject’s state of mind.
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Notes
- 1.
Wertz, Spacecraft Attitude Determination and Control, p. 27.
- 2.
While we’re on the subject of convention confusions, there’s a classic source of misunderstandings between spacecraft builders and spacecraft users that arises entirely from their respective roles. If you’re building a spacecraft, you literally see the thing in front of you and have the perspective of a god on the outside looking down on (actually more likely up to, unless it’s a very small spacecraft) your creation. So, for example, you see the star trackers attached to the body of the spacecraft and see the sensor’s field of view (FOV) from the outside looking in. By contrast, if you’re using a spacecraft, it’s way above your head in orbit, so you imagine yourself to be a bug sitting inside the spacecraft (or, if you’re a Trekkie, you imagine yourself to be Captain Kirk standing on the bridge of the Enterprise) looking out on the heavens through the windows provided by the sensors. This difference in perspective has led to numerous heated arguments between hardware providers and ACS analysts regarding reference frame polarities, and even worse, can produce an incorrect impression of agreement pre-launch, starting a ticking time bomb that will wait until a critical moment in the mission post-launch to rear its ugly head.
- 3.
Wertz, Spacecraft Attitude Determination and Control, p. 413.
- 4.
W. Hamilton, “On Quaternions, or On a New System of Imaginaries in Algebra”, in 18 installments in volumes 25–36 of The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, 1844–1850. See http://www.emis.de/classics/Hamilton/OnQuat.pdf.
- 5.
Wertz, Spacecraft Attitude Determination and Control, p. 414.
- 6.
See e.g., Markley and Crassidis, Fundamentals of Attitude Determination and Control, Sect. 2.7, and references therein.
- 7.
Wertz, Spacecraft Attitude Determination and Control, Appendix D.
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Hallock, H.L., Welter, G., Simpson, D.G., Rouff, C. (2017). Attitude Conventions and Definitions. In: ACS Without an Attitude. NASA Monographs in Systems and Software Engineering. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-7325-0_1
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