Adaptive orbit determination for interplanetary spacecraft
P. Daniel Burkhart, Robert H. Bishop · Journal of Guidance Control and Dynamics · 1996
The interplanetary orbit determination problem has been traditionally solved using least-squares techniques. Because of the operational limitations of this method, a Kalman filter approach has been proposed for future missions that includes all spacecraft and measurement modeling states in the filter. The goal is to increase the accuracy of the navigation process while utilizing only radiometric (Doppler and range) data. As an extension, an adaptive orbit determination approach (based on the Magill filter bank) has been developed here to process radiometric data. This adaptive approach can be used to systematically determine the operational filter parameters, which are currently selected using ad hoc methods. The Mars Pathfinder mission is utilized to demonstrate the effectiveness of the adaptive filter bank in determining variances for the process and measurement noise parameters based on the tracking data. Error budgets are presented for the range and Doppler cases, which show nongravitational accelerations and solar radiation pressure to be the main error sources. Results for the range case show that the adaptive enhanced filter bank is effective in selecting the noise variances that match those used to generate the data. Results for the Doppler case are not as conclusive, resulting primarily from linearization errors.