Autonomous navigation of formation flying spacecrafts in deep space exploration and communication by hybrid navigation utilizing neural network filter

Autonomous navigation of spacecrafts is a difficult task, however, which is a must in future deep space exploration. With multiple spacecrafts flying in space, this aim can be achieved by formation flying spacecraft (FFS) utilizing inverse time difference of arrival (ITDOA) and inverse difference Doppler (IDD) methods, which can locate the position of earth-station from one-way uplink signals in the FFS coordinate, and by way of conversion of coordinates, the position of FFS is achieved in earth-centered earth-fixed (ECEF) coordinate. The ability of neural network (NN) filter in navigation to extract position of spacecrafts from random measuring noise of signal arrival time and Doppler shift is studied with different radius of FFS and surveying parameters. The NN filter used by spacecraft group is new way Of unidirectional autonomous navigation and is of high precision of hybrid navigation. (C) 2009 Published by Elsevier Ltd.