Pointing System for the Balloon-Borne Astronomical Payloads

K. Nirmal, A. G. Sreejith, Joice Mathew, Mayuresh Sarpotdar, Ambily Suresh, Ajin Prakash, Margarita Safonova, Jayant Murthy
(Submitted on 1 Sep 2016)

We describe the development and implementation of a light-weight, fully autonomous 2-axis pointing and stabilization system designed for balloon-borne astronomical payloads. The system is developed using off-the-shelf components such as Arduino Uno controller, HMC 5883L magnetometer, MPU-9150 Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and iWave GPS receiver unit. It is a compact and rugged system which can also be used to take images/video in a moving vehicle, or in areal photography. The system performance is evaluated from the ground, as well as in conditions simulated to imitate the actual flight by using a tethered launch.

Comments: 20 pages, 9 figures, Submitted to Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as: arXiv:1609.00184 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:1609.00184v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
Submission history
From: K. Nirmal [view email]
[v1] Thu, 1 Sep 2016 11:06:00 GMT (3078kb,D)
http://arxiv.org/abs/1609.00184