Autonomous navigation based on stellar refraction for elliptic orbit spacecraft

This paper proposes a novel method based on stellar refraction to create a dynamic stellar catalogue for autonomous navigation and presents a principle of stellar choosing. Then, through the unscented Kalman filter, it analyses the applicability and the navigational accuracy that uses the stellar refraction method on the elliptic orbit spacecraft. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method and principle are simple and utility; the autonomous navigation method based on stellar refraction still has good applicability for elliptic orbit.