|
|||||
|
|
Interplanetary spacecraft navigation using pulsars |
|
| Authors: | XP Deng G Hobbs XP You MT Li MJ Keith RM Shannon W Coles RN Manchester JH Zheng XZ Yu D Gao X Wu D Chen |
| Institution: | 1. National Space Science Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China;2. CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science, Australia Telescope National Facility, P.O. Box 76, Epping NSW 1710, Australia;3. School of Information Science and Engineering, Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences,Beijing 100190, China;4. School of Physical Science and Technology, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715, China;5. Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA |
| Abstract: | We demonstrate how observations of pulsars can be used to help navigate a spacecraft travelling in the solar system. We make use of archival observations of millisecond pulsars from the Parkes radio telescope in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method and highlight issues, such as pulsar spin irregularities, which need to be accounted for. We show that observations of four millisecond pulsars every seven days using a realistic X-ray telescope on the spacecraft throughout a journey from Earth to Mars can lead to position determinations better than ∼20 km and velocity measurements with a precision of ∼0.1 ms−1. |
| Keywords: | Pulsars Spacecraft navigation |
| 本文献已被 ScienceDirect 等数据库收录！ | |