Today I looked into the "lost in space" problem: the determination of spacecraft orientation based on TV camera images of star fields from cameras fixed on the spacecraft body. This bears a lot of resemblance to the automated astrometry problem, although all solutions to the lost in space problem assume perfect knowledge of the "plate scale" of the images, and usually require very large image fields of view. Unfortunately, I can't link to the literature on this (or read it on the internet), because it is all in proprietary engineering publications. People: please stop publishing public research results in proprietary journals! (Although I love the thought that the journal editors think a theoretical paper on spacecraft orientation from 1995 is such valuable intellectual property that they can't let anyone see it without paying $2.95! I guess I will have to go to the engineering library.)
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