Abstract
At present, there is a great worldwide interest in the development of technologies that allow information about the X-ray emission from pulsating cosmic sources to be used to obtain navigation solutions for a spacecraft in deep space. In this paper, we illustrate the technique for determining the spatial position of a spacecraft based on the already existing data from the RXTE X-ray space observatory. We show that the spacecraft position toward the Crab pulsar can be determined using an X-ray detector with an effective area of about 0.6 m2 in the energy range 3–15 keV with an accuracy up to 730 m in a signal integration time of ~1000 s. Extending the energy range to 1 keV (the efficiency of the RXTE/PCA spectrometer decreases dramatically at energies below 3 keV) will allow a spacecraft position accuracy of ~400–450 m to be achieved at the same effective area and up to 300–350 m when using detectors with an effective area of ~1 m2 in the energy range 1–10 keV.
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Original Russian Text © M.G. Revnivtsev, O.E. Gadzhily, A.A. Lutovinov, S.V. Molkov, V.A. Arefiev, M.N. Pavlinsky, A.G. Tuchin, 2015, published in Pis’ma v Astronomicheskiĭ Zhurnal, 2015, Vol. 41, No. 8, pp. 490–496.
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Revnivtsev, M.G., Gadzhily, O.E., Lutovinov, A.A. et al. On the possibility of improving the orbits of satellites based on observations of isolated X-ray pulsars. Astron. Lett. 41, 450–455 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1134/S106377371508006X
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1134/S106377371508006X