摘要
In order to eliminate the impact of the Doppler effects caused by the motion of the spacecraft on the X-ray pulsar-based navigation, an innovative navigation method using the pulse phase and Doppler frequency measurements of the X-ray pulsars is proposed. Given the initial estimate of the spacecraft's state,the real-time photon arrival model is established at the spacecraft with respect to the spacecraft's position and velocity predicted by the orbit dynamic model and their estimation errors. On this basis, a maximum likelihood estimation algorithm directly using the observed photon event timestamps is developed to extract a single pair of pulse phase and Doppler frequency measurements caused by the spacecraft's state estimation error. Since the phase estimation error increases as the observation time increases, we propose a new measurement updating scheme of referring the measurements to the middle time of an observation interval. By using the ground-based simulation system of X-ray pulsar signals, a series of photon-level simulations are performed. The results testify to the feasibility and real-timeliness of the proposed navigation method, and show that the incorporation of the Doppler measurement as well as the pulse phase into the navigation filter can improve the navigation accuracy.
In order to eliminate the impact of the Doppler effects caused by the motion of the spacecraft on the X-ray pulsar-based navigation, an innovative navigation method using the pulse phase and Doppler frequency measurements of the X-ray pulsars is proposed. Given the initial estimate of the spacecraft's state, the real-time photon arrival model is established at the spacecraft with respect to the spacecraft's position and velocity predicted by the orbit dynamic model and their estimation errors. On this basis, a maximum likelihood estimation algorithm directly using the observed photon event timestamps is developed to extract a single pair of pulse phase and Doppler frequency measurements caused by the spacecraft's state estimation error. Since the phase estimation error increases as the observation time increases, we propose a new measurement updating scheme of referring the measurements to the middle time of an observation interval. By using the ground-based simulation system of X-ray pulsar signals, a series of photon-level simulations are performed. The results testify to the feasibility and real-timeliness of the proposed navigation method, and show that the incorporation of the Doppler measurement as well as the pulse phase into the navigation filter can improve the navigation accuracy.