Real-Time Navigation for Mars Missions Using the Mars Network

Lightsey, E. Glenn; Mogensen, Andreas; Burkhart, P. Daniel; Ely, Todd A.; Duncan, Courtney

doi:10.2514/1.30974

Cited by 61 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…One of the satellite's missions is to operate as a relay for the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) and other Mars surface assets. Additional studies 11 have been conducted on expanding the assets in Martian orbit into a Mars Network for data communications amongst assets and to Earth and using these sources for navigation 12 . As more surface assets are utilized, the need for a dedicated data trunk between local orbit and Earth increases.…”

Section: B Communication Techniques and Current Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Future studies will transition the analysis to a more robust simulation environment with each spacecraft operating independently, moving away from a direct integration of spacecraft state with measurements at specified intervals. Additional work is being done (and currently being implemented) on integrated communication models to capture spacecraft transmission and reception capabilities to provide a more detailed link analysis similar to Lightsey et al 12 and Munoz 24 . More advanced filtering methods are also under consideration to improve the state estimation accuracy (to take into account the inherent measurement and propagation errors), such as Unscented Kalman Filter and Particle Filter approaches.…”

Section: Future Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Conceptual Design of a Communication-based Deep Space Navigation Network

Anzalone

Chuang

2012

AIAA SPACE 2012 Conference &Amp; Exposition

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As the need grows for increased autonomy and position knowledge accuracy to support missions beyond Earth orbit, engineers must push and develop more advanced navigation sensors and systems that operate independent of Earth-based analysis and processing. Several spacecraft are approaching this problem using inter-spacecraft radiometric tracking and onboard autonomous optical navigation methods. This paper proposes an alternative implementation to aid in spacecraft position fixing. The proposed method Network-Based Navigation technique takes advantage of the communication data being sent between spacecraft and between spacecraft and ground control to embed navigation information. The navigation system uses these packets to provide navigation estimates to an onboard navigation filter to augment traditional ground-based radiometric tracking techniques. As opposed to using digital signal measurements to capture inherent information of the transmitted signal itself, this method relies on the embedded navigation packet headers to calculate a navigation estimate. This method is heavily dependent on clock accuracy and the initial results show the promising performance of a notional system. Nomenclature

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Section: B Communication Techniques and Current Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Future Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptual Design of a Communication-based Deep Space Navigation Network

Anzalone

Chuang

2012

AIAA SPACE 2012 Conference &Amp; Exposition

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“…It is difficult to achieve this target if the only available measurement sensor is the on-board default inertial measurement unit (IMU) to provide measurement information for the navigation, guidance, and control system during Mars atmospheric entry phase [8,9]. An innovative integrated navigation scheme during Mars atmospheric entry was proposed, which is adding the range measurements between the vehicle and the surface beacons or orbiters by using the UHF radio communication [10,11]. The key technology of the above navigation scheme is that the UHF radio communication is not blocked by the plasma sheath around the vehicle.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The key technology of the above navigation scheme is that the UHF radio communication is not blocked by the plasma sheath around the vehicle. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) develops an advanced Mars Network's Electra UHF transceiver, which is a prototype, embedded, real-time navigation system and can provide radio communication information between the vehicle and an orbiter or a surface beacon [10,12]. Levesque and de Lafontaine researched four integrated navigation scenarios and their observability based on radio ranging by using the unscented Kalman filter during the Mars atmospheric entry [11].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mars Atmospheric Entry Integrated Navigation with Partial Intermittent Measurements

Lou

Wang

Ding

et al. 2017

International Journal of Aerospace Engineering

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Signal degradation suffered by the vehicle is a combination brownout and blackout during Mars atmospheric entry. The communications brownout means that signal fades and blackout means that the signal is lost completely. The communications brownout and blackout periods are analyzed and predicted with an altitude and velocity profiles. In the brownout period, the range measurements between the vehicle and the orbiters are modeled as intermittent measurements with the radio signal arrival probabilities, which are distributed as a Rayleigh distribution of the electron number density around the entry vehicle. A new integrated navigation strategy during the Mars atmospheric entry phase is proposed to consider the probabilities of the radio measurements in the communications brownout and blackout periods under the IMU/beacon scenario based on the information filter with intermittent measurements. Numerical navigation simulations are designed to show the performance of the proposed navigation strategy under the integrated navigation scenario.

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“…Lightsey proposed different navigation schemes using radiometric measurements for the Mars approach and entry phases, and indicated that a more accurate navigation could be obtained (Burkhart et al, 2005;Lightsey et al, 2008). Furthermore, Pastor demonstrated that the position of radio beacons might be a great contributor to the navigation capability (Pastor et al, 2000).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%