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Aspects of Pulsar Navigation for Deep Space Mission Applications

The Journal of the Astronautical Sciences volume 67, pages 704–739 (2020)Cite this article

Abstract

This paper investigates the performance of pulsar-based navigation in deep space mission applications. The noise properties of X-ray based and radio-baspulsar measurements are examined and compared. A closed form parametric covariance analysis tool was developed in this study. It provides a rough estimate of the navigation performance associated with a deep space cruise that makes use of ion thrusters and sequential pulsar observations. In addition, the flight trajectory of the Dawn spacecraft was used to form a hypothetical deep space mission scenario that utilizes pulsars as navigation beacons. This simulated scenario accounts for clock uncertainty, pulsar timing noise, maneuver execution errors, sequential observation and interruptions between pulsar observations. A particle filter was implemented to reduce the large initial position uncertainty by resolving the number of pulsar wavelengths between the spacecraft and the Solar System Barycenter. The resulting position and velocity uncertainties from the particle filter can be used to initialize an Extended Kalman Filter, which estimates the spacecraft position and velocity for steady state operations.

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Acknowledgements

This work was performed, in part, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with NASA.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA

    Po-Ting Chen, Bonan Zhou & Jason L. Speyer

  2. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, 91109, USA

    David S. Bayard, Walid A. Majid & Lincoln J. Wood

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  1. Po-Ting Chen
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  2. Bonan Zhou
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Correspondence to Po-Ting Chen.

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Chen, PT., Zhou, B., Speyer, J.L. et al. Aspects of Pulsar Navigation for Deep Space Mission Applications. J Astronaut Sci 67, 704–739 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40295-019-00209-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40295-019-00209-9

Keywords

  • Pulsar
  • Navigation
  • Integer ambiguity resolution
  • Covariance analysis