Autonomous navigation for deep space explorer based on pulsar and Mars observation

• 1、College of Information Science and Engineering,Wuhan University of Science and Technology,Wuhan 430081
• 2、School of Instrumentation Science & Opto-electronics Engineering, Beihang University (BUAA), Beijing 100191
• 3、College of Information Science and Engineering,Hunan University, Changsha 410082

Abstract：In order to eliminate the pulsar ephemeris error and improve the navigation accuracy of cruise phase tail end for Mars explorer, an integrated navigation method based on pulsar and Mars observation is proposed. Subjected to the current measurement technology, there is an unavoidable error in the pulsar ephemeris information. Under this condition, the positioning accuracy of X-ray pulsar navigation is very low. Subjected to the low accuracy of Mars sensor and the long distance between the Mars and the deep space explorer, the Mars observation-based navigation method, whose accuracy of cruise phase tail end is low, does not satisfy the requirement of Mars exploration. As two methods are complementary to each other, and the navigation system is nonlinear, an extended Kalman filter, where the system bias caused by pulsar ephemeris error is considered as the augment state, is adopted to fuse their navigation information. Compared with the pulsar navigation and the Mars observation-based navigation, this integrated method is robust to the pulsar ephemeris error and the Mars sensor error, and its accuracy is very high, which can satisfy the requirement of the Mars exploration.

Keywords： Navigation；Pulsar；Deep space exploration；Kalman filter；Position determination