Autonomous navigation of Mars probe using X-ray pulsars: Modeling and results

Autonomous navigation of Mars probe is a main challenge due to the lack of dense ground tracking network measurements. In this paper, autonomous navigation of the Mars probe Orbits is investigated using the X-ray pulsars. A group of X-ray pulsars with high ranging accuracy are selected based on their properties and an adaptive extended Kalman filter is developed to incorporate the Mars probe dynamics and pulsar-based ranging measurements. Results of numerical experiment show that the three-dimensional positioning accuracy can achieve 750m in X-axis, 220m in Y-axis and 230m in Z-axis, which is much better than the positioning results by current Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) or Doppler observations with the accuracy of 150 km or several kilometers, respectively. (C) 2012 COSPAR. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved