Research on long-term autonomous orbit determination for navigation constellation using inter-satellite orientation observation information

Abstract

Long-term autonomous orbit determination is one of the key techniques of autonomous navigation for navigation constellation. Based only on cross-link range observation, which is not able to overcome the defect of entire constellation rotation and translation relative to inertial reference frame, the accuracy of autonomous orbit determination is reduced with time. In order to solve this problem, the approach of using inter-satellite orientation observation is put forward to estimate the constellation rotation and translation with the benefit of absolute position information provided by stars. In view of the fact that most navigation satellites moving in near circular orbits, and also in order to reduce the calculation burden of onboard computer, nonsingular orbital elements are chosen as state variables and analytical method is used to calculate the transition matrix in this paper. In addition, the extended Kalman filter is designed to fuse information of satellite dynamic model, cross-link range observation and inter-satellite orientation observation to determine the orbit. The simulation results based on the IGS Final Products of GPS constellation indicate that, at the certain error condition of range and orientation measurement, the URE of constellation is better than 2 meters within 120 days.