Engineering Commons^™

Multi -Mission Attitude Determination System For Balloon Flight, Liping Mo

Doctoral Dissertations

MADS (Multi-mission Attitude Determination System) is a new software package used to determine the attitude of instruments on a high-altitude balloon employed for scientific experiments. There is no existing system for the automated determination of the attitude of instruments in balloon experiments, so we have developed MADS to do the data analysis for balloon experiments to find the location of astrophysical sources such as gamma-ray or x-ray sources.

The two areas that required most work were modeling star trackers and modeling the motion of the balloon. Star trackers are used on satellites, but are far too expensive and sophisticated to …