Satellite pose estimation

ESA’s Advanced Concepts Team has teamed up with Stanford University’s Space Rendezvous Laboratory for its latest competition to harness machine learning for space-related goals. The topic of the competition is satellite ‘pose estimation’: identifying the relative position and pointing direction (known as attitude) of a target satellite from single snapshots of it moving through space. To ensure maximum realism, the starting point for the competition is results from an actual space mission. PRISMA – launched by the Swedish Space Corporation with the support of the German Aerospace Center, the Technical University of Denmark and French space agency CNES – was an experimental two-satellite mission to test formation-flying and rendezvous techniques, launched in 2010.