Abstract
A practical and reliable capability for autonomous navigation needs to reduce operation cost, to improve operational efficiency, and to increase mission safety. Celestial navigation is a very attractive autonomous navigation solution for deep space spacecraft. There are mainly two kinds of celestial navigation methods: the direct calculation method and the filter method. The accuracy of the direct calculation method is low and very sensitive to the measurement noise. The filter method can provide a better navigation performance if a high accuracy dynamical model is available. However, the main practical problem existing in the autonomous celestial navigation of spacecraft on a gravity assist trajectory is that the accuracy of trajectory model is not enough to be used in the real navigation sometimes, which may introduce large estimation error and even cause filter divergence. To solve this problem, a new celestial navigation method is proposed in this paper, which effectively combines the direct calculation method and the filter method using an interacting multiple model unscented Kalman filter (IMMUKF). The ground experimental results demonstrate that this method can provide better navigation performance and higher reliability than the traditional direct calculation method and filter method.
Highlights
The navigation of spacecrafts is performed primarily by the ground tracking, whose navigation accuracy can reach a few kilometers by the Doppler tracking, very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), and delta very long baseline interferometry (DVLBI) of deep space network (DSN) [1, 2]
The filter method uses an optimal filter combined with the celestial measurements and a system model to estimate the position of the spacecraft
This paper presents a new celestial navigation method combining the direct calculation method and the filter method for spacecraft on a gravity assist trajectory
Summary
The navigation of spacecrafts is performed primarily by the ground tracking, whose navigation accuracy can reach a few kilometers by the Doppler tracking, very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), and delta very long baseline interferometry (DVLBI) of deep space network (DSN) [1, 2]. The direct calculation method uses celestial measurements to directly calculate the position of the spacecraft according to the geometric relations between the spacecraft and celestial bodies [7] This method is very simple and is independent of the system model, but its navigation accuracy is relatively low and very sensitive to the measurement error. Because this method can deal with measurement noise, the navigation accuracy is higher than that of the direct calculation, but a highly accurate dynamical model is needed [8,9,10,11]
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