Method, System and Apparatus for Spacecraft Attitude Control Error Reduction in Trajectory Interpolation

Abstract

A method, apparatus and system for controlling an attitude of a spacecraft, the spacecraft including an attitude control system operatively associated with a ground-based spacecraft control system. According to an exemplary embodiment, the spacecraft attitude control system uses B-spline interpolator for commanding the spacecraft and a Kalman filtering process is used to estimate B-spline interpolator coefficients. The methods and systems disclosed herein can be implemented in, for example, executable machine code and/or integrated circuit hardware.