Simplified Covariance Estimation and Target Observation Management Method for On-Board Optical Navigation of Deep Space Probe

Abstract

On-board Orbit Determination (OD) using directions of celestial bodies, planets and asteroids, in the Solar System for the Autonomous Navigation (AutoNav) is introduced in this paper. For deep space missions, OD has been performed by Range and RangeRate (RARR), which is the traditional ground tracking approach by radio wave. RARR enables the higher accuracy of OD than other methods. However, such radio navigation has the inevitable problems, e.g. the reduction of radio wave strength and the transmitter limitation. Furthermore, people must stay and operate the spacecraft on the ground station, which makes the operating cost and burden considerable. Therefore, there has been a growing interest in the autonomy of the spacecraft in recent years to avoid the above-mentioned problems. This paper considers on-board OD using directions of celestial bodies from spacecraft. In particular, the selection of observation targets is focused on because it’s important that the selection of observation targets leads to the satisfaction of mission requirements or increment of science observation. Then, this paper presents the method for the target selection, which is computationally cheap and makes the target selection easy.