Traditional interplanetary orbit determination relies on Earth-based radiometric tracking, for which demand has increased in recent years and is projected to rise further in the future, resulting in oversubscribed ground station networks. Meanwhile, autonomous operations are desirable for faster response times to off-nominal events.

This work investigates the use of celestial navigation from asteroid beacon observations for the cruise phase orbit determination of an exploration mission to the main asteroid belt.
Using covariance analysis, the expected performance of celestial navigation is evaluated during the cruise phase, studied for its sensitivity to the model parameters and compared to traditional radiometric tracking. Under the high dynamical uncertainty associated with solar electric propulsion, beacon navigation yields comparable formal uncertainties to the baseline radiometric tracking setup for trajectory segments within the main asteroid belt. Beacon-augmented orbit determination could therefore potentially reduce the required tracking time, while achieving similar cruise phase performance.