Goddard Space Flight Center, Code 287, Greenbelt, MD 20771

A -- AUTONOMOUS STAR TRACKER FOR SOUNDING ROCKET FLIGHT SOL RFP5-14754/237 DUE 010295 POC Lorrie L. Eakin, Contract Specialist, (301) 286-4241 or Bradley J Poston, Contracting Officer, (301) 286-6843. NASA/GSFC intends to issue Request for Proposal (RFP)5-14754/237 on or about January 2, 1995 on a sole source basis for a firm fixed price to Lockheed Missiles and Space Company's Palo Alto Research Laboratory. Lockheed shall develop, test, and deliver one Autonomous Star Tracker (AST) that uses a Charged Coupled Device (CCD) for a detector and autonomously recognizes the inertial orientation of its boresight axis. The AST shall be delivered to Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) for integration into a sounding rocket as an experimental payload. The star tracker must be capable of surviving the sounding rocket flight environments and delivering data to the rocket's telemetry system. The flight will attempt to prove that the unit can operate in the ''stars in, quaternion out'' mode. The star tracker must be capable of performing autonomous inertial attitude recognition without a priori attitude knowledge. The star tracker specifications include: 1) The field of view shall be a minumum of 64 square degrees and shall be nominally square; 2) Systematic errors for individual stars shall be corrected within the tracker, as needed, such that each axis of the measured tracker output, exclusive of NEA, shall be less than 10 arc seconds from the true star position in the tracker coordinate frame. No additional, external calibration shall be required to meet this specification, nor shall any correction be required for stars of various spectral characteristics. Accuracy of the quaternion output shall be less than 1 arc second from the true inertial orientation. The one sigma error in a single star position measurement defined as Noise Equivalent Angle (NEA) in each axis shall not exceed 5 arc seconds; 3) The star tracker shall provide instrument magnitude information for each star being tracked to an absolute accuracy of +/- 0.25 magnitude, one sigma. The relative accuracy between stars in the field of view shall be +/- 0.1 magnitude, one sigma; 4) The star tracker shall provide position and magnitude information at a 5 Hz rate, minimum, when tracking stars; 5) The star tracker shall acquire, track and provide inertial data within 30 seconds of receiving a search command under all specified flight environmental conditions; 6) The star tracker including internal harnessing and light shade shall weigh less than 5 kg; and 7) The star tracker shall consume less than 10 watts under worst case conditions when used with the 28+/-7 volt spacecraft bus. The unit is to be delivered within 7 months with 3 months of pre and post launch support. The statutory authority for this procurement is 10 U.S.C. 2304 (c)(1), Only One Responsible Source. Any other persons desiring consideration are requested to fully identify their capabilities in writing, within fifteen (15) days of the publication of this synopsis to the GSFC Contracting Officer listed above. See Numbered Note(s): 22. (0025)

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