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research article

X-ray pulsar-based GNC system for formation flying in high Earth orbits

Song, Jianing
•
Pirat, Camille  
•
Gass, Volker  
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May 1, 2020
Acta Astronautica

In this paper, comprehensive pulsar-based Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC) system is designed and applied to satellites formation flying. The complete autonomy of the X-ray pulsar navigation technology provides both absolute and relative positioning information for spacecraft in or even beyond the solar system, and provides an interesting alternative solution to classical navigation techniques such as Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS). The navigation measurements are studied using a relative time of arrival (RTOA) estimating method, which takes advantage of the noise-filtered pulsar profiles in the cross-correlation estimator to achieve robustness. An adaptive Kalman filter is exploited to minimise the effect of processing noises caused by the primary satellite. A linear Quadratic Gaussian regulator is then applied to control the formation. Two different configurations are studied in high Earth orbits (HEOs). Simulation results show that the designed GNC algorithms can fulfill the required accuracy (10% of the baseline) of the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission, with the position root-mean-square error of similar to 1.6 km.. The excellent robustness of the designed GNC system on the positioning errors of the primary satellite suggests a role for X-ray pulsar-based formation flying technique in HEOs and the solar system.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1016/j.actaastro.2020.02.015
Web of Science ID

WOS:000524297200063

Author(s)
Song, Jianing
Pirat, Camille  
Gass, Volker  
Xu, Guodong
Zhang, Zhaoxiang
Zhang, Jinxiu
Date Issued

2020-05-01

Publisher

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD

Published in
Acta Astronautica
Volume

170

Start page

701

End page

711

Subjects

Engineering, Aerospace

•

Engineering

•

x-ray pulsar-based navigation

•

relative time of arrival (rtoa)

•

formation flying

•

guidance navigation, and control

•

linear quadratic gaussian

•

navigation

•

mission

•

design

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
CTS  
Available on Infoscience
April 23, 2020
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/168338
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