Thursday, August 05, 2004

Dual use star trackers

In the latest Rosetta image released, one can find that the star tracker was designed as a dual use instrument besides just star navigation. This is not the first time a star tracker is used for another purpose. The star scanner of Galileo was eventually used as a science intrument after the probe had been launched. It also found something that was astronomically relevant. This was a pretty amazing feat since operational instruments like a bus instruments like a star scanner / tracker have a dedicated mission and have very few additional embedded attributes that would make them interesting for other purposes.

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