A study of the application of the Navstar Global Positioning System (GPS) for rendezvous and docking in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), which required precise real time relative orbit determination, is presented. The study was performed for a typical rendezvous mission between the European Spaceplane Hermes and the Columbus Free Flying Laboratory (CFFL). The investigations comprise a covariance analysis of the relative orbit determination problem of the two spacecraft from Kalman filter processing of GPS pseudo range data acquired by receivers onboard the spacecraft. A method to derive the relative position and velocity errors from the absolute state vector covariances is described. An overview of the simulated orbit determination approach and the adopted error model is given. The results of various numerical simulations are discussed using both pure pseudo ranges and differenced observations. It is shown that with standard S code receivers, three dimensional absolute position accuracies of the order of 50 to 200 m and relative position accuracies of the order of a few meters can be achieved during the closing phase from 500 km distance. The associated velocity errors are about 10 to 30 cm/s and 1 cm/s, respectively. The overall concept of using GPS is proven to be quite feasible. It continues to operate satisfactorily under degraded conditions. With extremely precise P code receivers, the relative position accuracy during final approach may be sufficient to control even docking operations.
Application of GPS for Hermes Rendezvous Navigation
1991
10 pages
Report
No indication
English
Spacecraft Trajectories & Flight Mechanics , Control Devices & Equipment , Global positioning system , Hermes manned spaceplane , Rendezvous guidance , Space navigation , Spacecraft docking , Digital simulation , Kalman filters , Navstar satellites , Orbital position estimation , State vectors , Foreign technology
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