Observability and Performance Analysis of Spacecraft Autonomous Navigation Using Stellar Aberration Observation

Abstract

Autonomous navigation is one of the trends of aerospace development. The accuracy improvement of astrometry and celestial navigation sensors is paving a promising path toward navigation using celestial measurement. Under this background, the paper presents an autonomous navigation method basing on stellar aberration effect. In the method, the inter-star angle is used as measurements. With the help of the orbit dynamic model and an extended Kalman filter, spacecraft orbit parameters can be estimated. By constructing the observability matrix and calculating the condition number of the observability matrix, the performance of navigation system is assessed. Finally, the Monte-Carlo simulation results demonstrate the feasibility of the navigation method, and when inter-star angles between three stars are simultaneously chosen as measurements, a precision better than 200m can be achieved.