Pulsar Navigation

This paper evaluates the fundamental perfor-mance bounds, signal processing and techno-logical complexity associated with the synchro-nization to radio and X-ray pulsars as well as its impact on the positioning accuracy of an au-tonomous spacecraft navigation system. Per-formance analysis of synchronization and loca-tion algorithms builds on Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimation which provides, asymptoti-cally, unbiased minimum variance estimates with mean square error strictly approaching the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB).