PULSAR NAVIGATION

This paper evaluates the fundamental performance bounds, signal processing and technological complexity associated with the synchronization to radio and X-ray pulsars as well as its impact on the positioning accuracy of an autonomous spacecraft navigation system. Per-formance analysis of synchronization and location algo-rithms builds on Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimation which provides, asymptotically, unbiased minimum vari-ance estimates with mean square error strictly approach-ing the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB). 1