High accuracy pointing for stratospheric balloon-borne telescopes: simulating the pointing architecture of the DICOS Mission

Stratospheric balloons have been used for many years as platforms to carry scientific payloads into the upper layers of the atmosphere. Compared to satellites and launchers, they are cost-efficient, reusable, flexible in their deployment and operability, able to carry heavy payloads and impose few mechanical constraints on them. DICOS is a balloon experiment under development at CNES that aims to demonstrate the feasibility of coronagraph imaging to study exoplanets aboard a balloon-borne gondola. Such an ambitious mission requires very accurate pointing performance under the tenth of an arcsecond. To assess the pointing architecture and validate the different transitions of DICOS pointing modes before its expected flight in 2024-2025, a generic simulator was developed in MATLAB/Simulink with a full dynamical model of the flight chain and different models of sensors, actuators, and flight software. This thesis presents the activities performed during the traineeship at the CNES site of Toulouse and the improvements made to the simulator. Several models have been implemented, and their effects on the entire simulator have been analyzed and discussed.