A study of the performance of the Global Positioning System (GPS) for orbit determination and rendezvous in low earth orbit is presented. Existing techniques developed for terrestrial, marine, and airborne navigation applications are extended to the space environment. The accuracy of the system for absolute and relative navigation is evaluated by simulating the actual operation of GPS onboard two near earth spacecraft. Dynamic and environmental models are developed to provide a realistic basis for the performance simulation. Two major results are demonstrated: 1) information provided by an orbiting differential GPS reference station to other GPS receivers in the vicinity can improve the absolute navigation performance of these other receivers to the same level as that achieved by the reference; 2) similar receivers constrained to take measurements from the same four GPS satellites can achieve relative positioning accuracy for precise code operation and for coarse acquisition code operation. Both differential GPS and relative navigation techniques show little degradation of performance for significant receiver separations.
Near earth orbit determination and rendezvous navigation using GPS
Erdnahe Orbitbestimmung und Rendezvous-Navigation mit GPS
1986
8 Seiten, 12 Bilder, 3 Tabellen, 5 Quellen
Conference paper
English
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