Inertial Stellar Compass (ISC) is an instrument concept for an advanced navigation system designed to allow spacecraft of the future to operate more autonomously. The ISC is small in size and consumes low power to operate. ISC is a proposed instrument of NASA, part of New Millennium program's

Space Technology 6 Space Technology 6 (ST-6) is part of the NASA New Millennium Program. ST-6 is a subsystem technology demonstration that consisted of 2 separate projects, the Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment on board the Earth Observing 1 satellite and the Iner ...

project, and currently under development at

Charles Stark Draper Laboratory Draper Laboratory is an American non-profit research and development organization, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts; its official name is The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc (sometimes abbreviated as CSDL). The laboratory specialize ...

. The instrument functions with a combination of a miniaturized star tracker and

gyroscope A gyroscope (from Ancient Greek γῦρος ''gŷros'', "round" and σκοπέω ''skopéō'', "to look") is a device used for measuring or maintaining orientation and angular velocity. It is a spinning wheel or disc in which the axis of rota ...

s. It uses a wide field-of-view active pixel star camera and a micro electromechanical system to determine the real-time stellar

attitude Attitude may refer to: Philosophy and psychology * Attitude (psychology), an individual's predisposed state of mind regarding a value * Metaphysics of presence * Propositional attitude, a relational mental state connecting a person to a prop ...

(orientation) of the spacecraft. It has a mass of and requires 3.5 W power.

References

New Millennium Program Spacecraft instruments {{Spacecraft-stub

See also

References