The term “satellite attitude” refers to the orientaiton of a satellite
in a fixed coordiate system and its angular rates around the
corresponding axis. A satellite operation on-board shall meet the
requirements in its orientation such as antenna pointing to ground
station, solar panel orientation and earth pointing for imaging.
In order to be able to estimate and control the attitude of the
satellite with programmed tasks, the attitude determination and control
subsystem (ADCS) must be provided with accurate and reliable data
from a various types of sensors such as: sun sensor, star tracker,
angular rate sensor, magnetic field sensor. It should be noted that each
type of sensor has many different features such as sampling rate,
accuracy, reliability and dependency on current position of the
satellite. Therefore: Multi-sensor data fusion is the process of
combining measurements from different sensors to produce better
results than using individual ones.