An Approach to Autonomous Orbital Navigation

The development of an autonomous system for orbital navigation is as much constrained by operational requirements as by the observables and measureables of space flight. In the development of suitable navigational concepts (either implicit or explicit), the data acquisition and data processing facets of the overall problem must be considered. This paper presents an explicit solution to the subject problem that provides a combined manual and automatic capability for all phases of the navigation problem, that is, a scheme that yields a direct measure of orbital parameters through several alternate approaches, rather than one that measures and corrects for deviations from a reference trajectory. The steps leading to this solution are indicated along with a description of an appropriate configuration of equipment.