Autonomous orbit determination and its error analysis for deep space using X-ray pulsar

Autonomous orbit determination (OD) is a complex process using filtering method to integrate observation and orbit dynamic model effectively and estimate the position and velocity of a spacecraft. As a novel technology for autonomous interplanetary OD, X-ray pulsar holds great promise for deep space exploration. The position and velocity of spacecraft should be estimated accurately during the OD process. However, under the same condition, the accuracy of OD can be greatly reduced by the error of the initial orbit value and the orbit mutation. To resolve this problem, we propose a novel OD method, which is based on the X-ray pulsar measurement and Adaptive Unscented Kalman Filter (AUKF). The accuracy of OD can be improved obviously because the AUKF estimates the orbit of spacecraft using measurement residual. During the simulation, the orbit of Phoenix Mars Lander, Deep Impact Probe, and Voyager 1 are selected. Compared with Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) and Extended Kalman Filter (EKF), the simulation results demonstrate that the proposed OD method based on AUKF can accurately determinate the velocity and position and effectively decrease the orbit estimated errors which is caused by the orbit mutation and orbit initial errors.