An Autonomous Orbit Determination Method for Space Service Volume with Deficient GPS Measurements

摘要

With an increasing number of artificial satellites and spacecraft launched in the last few years, ground based orbit determination systems, such as normally used Satellite User Ranging(SLR) is encountering with overload work and rapidly growing cost, GPS based autonomous orbit determination is playing a more and more important role, especially for Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites in Terrestrial Service Volume (TSV). However, GPS is not able to be utilized in Space Service Volume (SSV) because of the fact that available GPS satellites would be deficient in many conditions. In order to realize GPS based autonomous orbit determination in SSV for High Earth Orbit (HEO) and Geosynchronous (GEO) satellites, an autonomous orbit determination method with deficient GPS measurement complemented with orbital dynamics and altitude measurements from other sensors is proposed in this study. A simulation demonstrates that this approach is able to provide hundred-meter level positioning precision with only two available satellites, whereas, the satellite position would diverse beyond more than 10,000 m if only utilizing orbit dynamics, which authenticates a satisfactory performance of the proposed method. The proposed autonomous orbit determination approach is expected to be able to provide services to HEO and GEO satellites as well as other deep space exploration spacecraft in GPS SSV.