Damping Gimballess Inertial Navigation Systems

The mechanization of a gimballess inertial system for space navigation is considered. An error analysis reveals that the errors contain both sinusoidal and diverging components. Error damping methods are proposed and it is shown that damping can be achieved by using appropriate damping circuits and auxiliary information obtained from devices such as stellar trackers, velocity-measuring optical Doppler, or radar Doppler. Computer-stored reference-trajectory information can also be used for error damping.