Abstract
The further development of X-ray pulsar-based NAVigation (XNAV) is hindered by its lack of accuracy, so accuracy improvement has become a critical issue for XNAV. In this paper, an XNAV augmentation method which utilizes both pulsar observation and X-ray ranging observation for navigation filtering is proposed to deal with this issue. As a newly emerged concept, X-ray communication (XCOM) shows great potential in space exploration. X-ray ranging, derived from XCOM, could achieve high accuracy in range measurement, which could provide accurate information for XNAV. For the proposed method, the measurement models of pulsar observation and range measurement observation are established, and a Kalman filtering algorithm based on the observations and orbit dynamics is proposed to estimate the position and velocity of a spacecraft. A performance comparison of the proposed method with the traditional pulsar observation method is conducted by numerical experiments. Besides, the parameters that influence the performance of the proposed method, such as the pulsar observation time, the SNR of the ranging signal, etc., are analyzed and evaluated by numerical experiments.
Highlights
Being an autonomous navigation method applied for solar system and beyond, XNAV (X-ray pulsar-based NAVigation) has been a hot research area during the past ten years
We propose an augmentation method for XNAV based on X-ray communication (XCOM), which utilizes accurate X-ray ranging as the extra observation to improve the XNAV
The area of the X-ray detector is set to 10,000 cm2 and the background flux intensity is set to be
Summary
Being an autonomous navigation method applied for solar system and beyond, XNAV (X-ray pulsar-based NAVigation) has been a hot research area during the past ten years. Multiple aspects of XNAV, including Time of Arrival (TOA) measurement [1,2,3], time transfer [4,5,6], ambiguity resolution [7,8,9], filtering algorithms [10,11] etc., have been studied to verify the feasibility of XNAV. The available accuracy of XNAV is about several hundred meters, which is far from the designed accuracy [7]. The gap is caused by various factors, including the inaccuracy of the noise model, the relativistic effects, the limitations of current X-ray detectors, the ephemeris error, etc. The limited available accuracy greatly hinders the application of XNAV, how to improve the positioning accuracy of XNAV under current conditions has become a critical and urgent issue
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