A convex solution to Psiaki's first joint attitude and spin-rate estimation problem

We consider the problem of jointly estimating the attitude and spin-rate of a spinning spacecraft. Psiaki (J. Astronautical Sci., 57(1-2):73--92, 2009) has formulated a family of optimization problems that generalize the classical least-squares attitude estimation problem, known as Wahba's problem, to the case of a spinning spacecraft. If the rotation axis is fixed and known, but the spin-rate is unknown (such as for nutation-damped spin-stabilized spacecraft) we show that Psiaki's problem can be reformulated exactly as a type of tractable convex optimization problem called a semidefinite optimization problem. This reformulation allows us to globally solve the problem using standard numerical routines for semidefinite optimization. It also provides a natural semidefinite relaxation-based approach to more complicated variations on the problem.

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