Angular Position Determination of Spacecraft by Radio Interferometry

This paper describes a variety of interferometric techniques that may be used for measuring the angular location of a spacecraft with respect to natural celestial radio sources or another spacecraft. The differential propagation time-delay techniques largely cancel the common error sources and norma...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the IEEE 2007-11, Vol.95 (11), p.2193-2201
Main Authors: Lanyi, Gabor, Bagri, Durgadas S., Border, James S.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Angular
Angular position
Coordinate measuring machines
Deep Space Network (DSN)
Delay effects
differential
differential one-way ranging (DOR)
Errors
Extraterrestrial measurements
Frequency
Interferometry
Navigation
Phase measurement
Platforms
position
Position measurement
Radio
Radio interferometry
Receiving
Space vehicles
Spacecraft
Time delay
Time measurement
tracking
Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA)
very long baseline interferometry (VLBI)
X-band
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Summary:This paper describes a variety of interferometric techniques that may be used for measuring the angular location of a spacecraft with respect to natural celestial radio sources or another spacecraft. The differential propagation time-delay techniques largely cancel the common error sources and normally achieve low angular coordinate errors. Currently, the accuracy of the techniques are in the 1-2 nrad range for observations with a duration of one hour and 3-6deg of mean angular separation between the spacecraft and the reference sources at X-band frequencies. There are various possible ways to implement the differential angular measurements depending upon the determination of the phase cycle ambiguities associated with the differential propagation time delays of remote sources. There are methods that utilize a sufficiently large range of observing frequencies and others that rely upon the spatial arrangement of the receiving system and the rotation of the terrestrial platform. We summarize the methodologies and the advantages and disadvantages of the various techniques.
ISSN:0018-9219
1558-2256
DOI:10.1109/JPROC.2007.905183