A Versatile Stellar-Referenced Inertial Platform

This paper describes a gimballed, unitized stellar reference platform of high accuracy conceived by the author. Such a concept presents a straight-forward and reliable off-the-shelf system ideally suited for virtually any space mission requiring a highly accurate inertial reference, while eliminating numerous disadvantages of conventional systems. Also discussed is an optical lobing technique analagous to radar methods for greatly increased accuracy. Patent disclosures on both concepts have been submitted by the author.