Autonomous Navigation Performance of Cislunar Orbits considering High Crosslink Measurement Errors

Abstract

This study investigates the application of the Linked Autonomous Interplanetary Satellite Orbit Navigation (LiAI-SON) technique for multiple small spacecraft in cislunar orbits considering high inter-satellite range measurement errors. The LiAISON method provides an autonomous orbit determination solution using crosslink measurements such as range, and/or range-rate. Inter-satellite ranging can be done via conventional tone or code based methods. Considering the limited on-board transmission power available on small satellites, ranging and data transfer, required to cope with the limited contact time, introduce further observable degradation and limiting performance. For such cases, and to increase the supported data rates, telemetry ranging and time-derived ranging architectures can be used. Unfortunately, in time-derived methods, measurements are not as accurate as using other methods, limiting the ap-plicability of such technique only to few missions. This paper presents a simulation based analysis to understand the limits of LiAISON for a multi-spacecraft mission at the Earth-Moon L1, L2 Halo and Lunar orbits considering high inter-satellite measurements errors due to time-derived and telemetry-based ranging methods and without Doppler measurements. This is specifically targeted at small satellites with limited power budgets and radio links lacking coherent Doppler tracking. The simulation results show that the LiAISON-based autonomous orbit determination works well for configurations of cislunar orbits, having the link between Lagrangian and Lunar orbits, even with high crosslink ranging errors.