In-orbit evaluation of relative GPS navigation for autonomous rendezvous docking of ETS-VII

摘要

Engineering Test Satellite-VII (ETS-VII) successfully performed the first autonomous Rendezvous Docking (RVD) flight using Relative GPS navigation in the world. ETS-VII is a test satellite to perform in-orbit demonstration of the autonomous rendezvous docking (RVD) technology. Relative GPS (RGPS) navigation which is a sort of differential GPS (DGPS) is used primarily in a relative approach phase (more than 500m from target satellite). It could be shown that accuracy of position estimation of the ETS-VII RGPS navigation was about 10m. In this paper, we will introduce evaluations of in-orbit performance of the ETS-VII RGPS navigation.