X射线脉冲星计时导航应用模式与空间试验进展

结合国家导航体系发展与工程应用迫切需求，主要讨论了X射线脉冲星计时导航的应用模式，并介绍了国内外空间试验进展。总结了脉冲星计时地基射电与空间X射线观测的特点和发展现状，阐释了脉冲星时研究与发展的重要意义；总结并归纳了X射线脉冲星导航的应用特点和现有水平，讨论了X射线脉冲星导航的技术优势和典型应用场景；总结了国内外X射线脉冲星计时导航的空间试验进展。根据国内外的空间试验结果，脉冲星时稳定度可达10-14量级，脉冲星导航精度可达到km量级，初步具备在轨应用价值。因此，加快推进国内脉冲星计时导航技术的在轨演示验证与工程应用具有重要意义。     

Cramér-rao lower bound for pulsar rotation parameters estimation with X-ray pulsar observation data

In this paper, the Cramér-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) for estimating the rotation parameters of pulsars using X-ray pulsar observation data is deduced, and the calculation equation is presented. In order to verify the correctness of the deduced equation, we use the X-ray pulsar observation data to estimate pulsar rotation parameters, and obtain the root mean square error (RMSE) of the estimated pulsar rotation parameters through conducting repeated experiments. The experimental results suggest that when the observation time increases, the RMSE gradually approaches the estimated CRLB, and that when the observation time is 2.4 × 10⁶ s, the error between the RMSE of pulsar frequency estimation and the CRLB stays at 10^?11 order of magnitude. This verifies that the CRLB expression deduced in this paper is the theoretical lower bound for estimating pulsar rotation parameters. The deduced CRLB in this paper helps determine the minimum variance estimator for pulsar rotation parameter estimation using X-ray pulsar data, providing a benchmark for the comparison between the minimum variance estimator and other estimators.     

Distributed satellite autonomous navigation using X-ray pulsars

Distributed X-ray pulsar-based navigation (DXNAV) is an effective method to realize earth-orbit satellite positioning under weak pulsar signal conditions. In this paper, we propose a new DXNAV method based on multiple information fusion. The DXNAV system principle and the pulse phase estimate Cramér-Rao lower bound are deduced. To suppress the calculation complexity and the error source, the X-ray pulsar photon time-of-arrival detected by each satellite is equivalently converted to the leading satellite directly using the inter-satellite link ranging and starlight angular distance measurement. A high precision estimate model of the pulse phase is built using pulsar standard profile, observed profile, and star-geocentric angular distance from distributed satellites. The estimated pulse phase is real-time supplied to the navigation system, which is established in the form of a deviation equation. The two-stage Kalman filter is designed to estimate the pulse phase in profile histogram bin step and the leader position in real-time step. Compared separately with the maximum likelihood phase estimate method and the celestial navigation method using only the star-geocentric angular distance, the simulation analysis shows that the estimation precisions of position and velocity are improved by 29% and 25%.     

Frequency steering of spaceborne clocks based on XPNAV-1 observations

Due to high stable rotations, timing of pulsars provides a natural tool to correct the frequency deviation of spaceborne atomic clocks. Based on processing the observational data about a year of Crab pulsar given by XPNAV-1 satellite, we study the possibility of correcting the frequency deviation of spaceborne atomic clocks using pulsar timing. According to the observational data in X-ray band and the timing model parameters from radio observations, the pre-fit timing residuals with a level of 6...