ACCURACY OF NAVIGATION IN VARIOUS REGIONS OF EARTH-MOON SPACE WITH VARIOUS COMBINATIONS OF ONBOARD OPTICAL MEASUREMENTS

摘要

A study was made of the relative accuracies of 60 combinations of onboard optical observations that may be available for use in determining the position and velocity of a spacecraft from the vicinity of the earth to the vicinity of the moon. The method of analysis consisted of computing along a nominal trajectory the mathematically correct onboard-optical-observation angles for specified times, adding random errors to the optical observations, computing transition matrices, and statistically reducing the results to obtain the estimated errors in the initial position and velocity for a particular region of the trajectory.