Fast simulation of X-ray pulsar signals at a spacecraft

摘要

Existing methods for simulating pulsar signals at a spacecraft are inapplicable for large flux or high frequency because of their low efficiency, hindering research on X-ray pulsar-based navigation. To solve the problem, we propose a fast method based on the relation derivation between the photon arrival time and corresponding photon phase at the spacecraft. The absolute differences of searched frequencies between simulated data and observational data for the Crab pulsar are less than10(-4), which sufficiently validates the method. Furthermore, the proposed method is up to 3 orders of magnitude faster than other methods, which shows that it is more efficient and better satisfies the needs of real-time navigation verification.