This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. ; Thesis: Ph. D. in Space Systems, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2020 ; Cataloged from the PDF of thesis. ; Includes bibliographical references (pages 149-157). ; Autonomous navigation refers to satellites performing on-board, real-time navigation without external input. As satellite systems evolve into more distributed architectures, autonomous navigation can help mitigate challenges in ground operations, such as determining and disseminating orbit solutions. Several autonomous navigation methods have been previously studied, using some combination of on-board sensors that can measure relative range or bearing to known bodies, such as horizon and star sensors (Hicks and Wiesel, 1992) or magnetometers and sun sensors (Psiaki, 1999), however these methods are typically limited to low Earth orbit (LEO) altitudes or other specific orbit cases. Another autonomous navigation method uses intersatellite data, or direct observations of the relative position vector from one satellite to another, to estimate the orbital positions of both spacecraft simultaneously. ; The seminal study of the intersatellite method assumes the use of radio time-of-flight measurements of intersatellite range, and a visual tracking camera system for measuring the inertial bearing from one satellite to another (Markley, 1984). Due to the limited range constraints of passively illuminated visual tracking systems, many of the previous studies restrict the separation between satellites to less than 1,000 kilometers (e.g., Psiaki, 2011), or simply drop the use of measuring intersatellite bearing and rely solely on obtaining a large distribution of intersatellite range measurements for state estimation (e.g., Xu et al., 2014). These assumptions have limited the assessment of the performance capability of autonomous navigation using intersatellite ...
Autonomous navigation of distributed spacecraft using intersatellite laser communications
2020-01-01
1201257970
Theses
Electronic Resource
English
EDSN Intersatellite Communications Architecture
NTIS | 2014
|EDSN Intersatellite Communications Architecture
NTIS | 2014
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