Initial Results of the Software-driven Navigation for Station Experiment

Abstract

To enable the next generation of robotic and human exploration of the solar system, improvements are needed to enable robust and accurate autonomous navigation. The purpose of this work is to take advantage of the growth in and use of software-defined platforms to incorporate additional navigation capability on existing assets, while also incorporating with new vehicle designs. The Software-driven Navigation for Station Experiment focuses on implementing two soft solutions to this: transmitting pseudolite signals to perform ranging and Doppler measurements as part of the signal coding (similar to underlying Global Navigation Satellite System approaches), and the Multi-spacecraft Autonomous Positioning System, which uses existing communication protocols to embed navigation and timing information to be shared among all assets in a peer-to-peer network. These technologies were implemented on the SCaN Testbed onboard the International Space Station and exercised over the course of mid-June and late-July 2018. This paper will discuss the operational architecture, experiment plan, and initial results from the data collected. One of the key conclusions of this work is the strong need for stable accurate clock synchronization across the dispersed space network.

Use of Navigation Beacons to Support Lunar Vehicle Operations

“…Initial studies of this concept focused on simulation results and initial hardware-in-the-loop testing. In the summer of 2018, software implementing this architecture was uploaded to the SCaN SDR Testbed onboard ISS for a series of orbital demonstrations on flight hardware [19]. In this experiment, ranging data was sent via direct to ground, payload telemetry, and through TDRS to be timestamped and it quality assessed for navigation capabilities.…”