By Jan Kolmas November 7, 2014
Photo from the 7thPNT symposium (credits: scpnt.stanford.edu)
Last week, two Space Rendezvous Lab (SLAB) researchers presented their work at the 8th Stanford Center for Position, Navigation and Time (SCPNT) Annual Symposium, hosted at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
The 8th Annual symposium was held on 28th-30th October 2014. This year, 177 attendees from 84 institutions had the opportunity to witness 32 presentations delivered by professionals, faculty and students on topics related to position, navigation and time.
Prof. Simone D’Amico, lab’s principal investigator, presented an overview of precision GNSS-based navigation for miniaturized distributed space systems. In his presentation, D’Amico focused on the challenges associated with achieving high precision given the limited resources of small satellites.
Sumant Sharma, a graduate student at SLAB, shared his research on pose estimation of uncooperative spacecraft using monocular vision. According to Sharma, this technology is essential for development of small servicing satellites capable of repairing or disposing of defective satellites.
Sharma added that he will continue researching this topic and plans to present his results at the International Workshop on Satellite Constellations and Formation Flying in June 2015 at TU Delft in Netherlands.
Founder and Technical Director of SCPNT, Prof. Per Enge, expressed his excitement about the representation of space navigation applications at the increasingly popular conference and about the research being conducted at SLAB.
Jan Kolmas is a graduate student in Stanford’s Space Rendezvous Lab
