The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) is currently developing an operational Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) System (TDRSS) Onboard Navigation System (TONS) to provide realtime, autonomous, high-accuracy navigation products to users of TDRSS. A TONS experiment was implemented on the Explorer Platform/Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer (EP/EUVE) spacecraft, launched June 7, 1992, to flight qualify the TONS operational system using TDRSS forward-link communications services. This paper provides a detailed evaluation of the flight hardware, an ultrastable oscillator (USO) and Doppler extractor (DE) card in one of the TDRSS user transponders and the ground-based prototype flight software performance, based on the 1 year of TONS experiment operation. The TONS experiment results are used to project the expected performance of the TONS 1 operational system. TONS 1 processes Doppler data derived from scheduled forward-link S-band services using a sequential estimation algorithm enhanced by a sophisticated process noise model to provide onboard orbit and frequency determination and time maintenance. TONS 1 will be the prime navigation system on the Earth Observing System (EOS)-AM1 spacecraft, currently scheduled for launch in 1998. Inflight evaluation of the USO and DE short-term and long-term stability indicates that the performance is excellent. Analysis of the TONS prototype flight software performance indicates that realtime onboard position accuracies of better than 25 meters root-mean-square are achievable with one tracking contact every one to two orbits for the EP/EUVE 525-kilometer altitude, 28.5 degree inclination orbit. The success of the TONS experiment demonstrates the flight readiness of TONS to support the EOS-AM1 mission.


    Access

    Access via TIB

    Check availability in my library


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    TDRSS Onboard Navigation System (TONS) Flight Qualification Experiment


    Contributors:
    C. J. Gramling (author) / R. C. Hart (author) / D. C. Folta (author) / A. C. Long (author)

    Publication date :

    1994


    Size :

    15 pages


    Type of media :

    Report


    Type of material :

    No indication


    Language :

    English




    TDRSS Onboard Navigation System (TONS) flight qualification experiment

    Gramling, C. J. / Hart, R. C. / Folta, D. C. et al. | NTRS | 1994


    TDRSS Onboard Navigation System (TONS) Flight Qualification Experiment

    Gramling, C. / Hart, R. / Folta, D. et al. | British Library Conference Proceedings | 1994


    Flight Qualification of the TDRSS Onboard Navigation System (TONS)

    Gramling, C. J. / Hart, R. C. / Teles, J. et al. | British Library Conference Proceedings | 1993


    Flight Qualification of the TDRSS Onboard Navigation System (TONS) (AAS 93-710)

    Gramling, C. J. / Hart, R. C. / Teles, J. et al. | British Library Conference Proceedings | 1993