Pico-satellite Autonomous Navigation with Magnetometer and Sun Sensor Data

This article presents a near-Earth satellite orbit estimation method for pico-satellite applications with light-weight and low-power requirements. The method provides orbit information autonomously from magnetometer and sun sensor, with an extended Kalman filter (EKF). Real-time position/velocity parameters are estimated with attitude independently from two quantities: the measured magnitude of the Earth’s magnetic field, and the measured dot product of the magnetic field vector and the sun vector. To guarantee the filter’s effectiveness, it is recommended that the sun sensor should at least have the same level of accuracy as magnetometer. Furthermore, to reduce filter’s computation expense, simplification methods in EKF’s Jacobian calculations are introduced and testified, and a polynomial model for fast magnetic field calculation is developed. With these methods, 50% of the computation expense in dynamic model propagation and 80% of the computation burden in measurement model calculation can be reduced. Tested with simulation data and compared with original magnetometer-only methods, filter achieves faster convergence and higher accuracy by 75% and 30% respectively, and the suggested simplification methods are proved to be harmless to filter’s estimation performance.