Spacecraft navigation using landmarks, a subclass of optical navigation, enables autonomy from external navigation systems, which can reduce the burden on those systems and improve system reliability when faced with outages in external navigation systems. This work investigates the observability of landmark navigation from a spacecraft in a circular orbit about Earth using a directional sensor with its line of sight fixed in the local orbital frame. The conditions for observability are proven for estimating the spacecraft position and velocity as well as for estimating the Earth orientation parameters. Specifically, for Earth satellites using Earth landmarks estimating only position and velocity is always observable, estimating the Earth rotation angle is observable for certain sensor lines of sight in non-polar orbits, and estimating polar motion adds an additional constraint that the orbit cannot be geostationary. The formal proof of conditions for observability when estimating Earth orientation parameters are believed to be novel. While these results are derived for Earth they can be applied to deep space spacecraft in orbit about a suitable central body as well.


    Access

    Check access

    Check availability in my library

    Order at Subito €


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    On the Observability of Spacecraft Navigation Using Landmarks


    Contributors:


    Publication date :

    2022-03-05


    Size :

    465557 byte




    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English



    Autonomous Spacecraft Navigation Using Ground Landmarks

    Jacobson, M. V. / International Space University | British Library Conference Proceedings | 1997


    Fast Image Registration for Spacecraft Autonomous Navigation Using Natural Landmarks

    Yun-Hua Wu / Lin-Lin Ge / Feng Wang et al. | DOAJ | 2018

    Free access

    Analytical Nonlinear Observability Analysis for Spacecraft Autonomous Relative Navigation

    Dong, Tianshu / Wang, Dayi / Fu, Fangzhou et al. | IEEE | 2022


    Observability criterion of angles-only navigation for spacecraft proximity operations

    Gong, Baichun / Luo, Jianjun / Li, Shuang et al. | SAGE Publications | 2019


    NAVIGATION USING SELECTED VISUAL LANDMARKS

    KERZNER DANIEL TODD / SEYFI AHMAD / MEYER TIMON et al. | European Patent Office | 2021

    Free access