Performance Analysis of Radiometric Autonomous Navigation for Lunar Satellite Network Topologies

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Abstract

This study provides a performance analysis of radiometric autonomous navigation for the lunar satellite network topologies formed by three spacecraft at various orbits. This work is built on the Linked Autonomous Interplanetary Satellite Orbit Navigation (LiAISON) method and uses mesh (distributed) and centralized (star) network topologies. The optimal interlink network topologies and Distributed Satellite Systems (DSS) geometry have been investigated based on the Circular-Restricted Three-Body problem (CRTBP) and the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) for state estimation. The network topologies consisted of all the possible combinations of 16 spacecraft at various L1/L2 Halo, Lyapunov, and Lunar orbits. It has been shown that the autonomous navigation system provided better state estimation results for the mesh topology than for the centralized topology. Overall, the lunar satellite network topologies consisting of orbits with large inter-satellite link distances and short orbital periods would bene_t most from the radiometric autonomous navigation.