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Beacons for supporting lunar landing navigation

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Abstract

Current and future planetary exploration missions involve a landing on the target celestial body. Almost all of these landing missions are currently relying on a combination of inertial and optical sensor measurements to determine the current flight state with respect to the target body and the desired landing site. As soon as an infrastructure at the landing site exists, the requirements as well as conditions change for vehicles landing close to this existing infrastructure. This paper investigates the options for ground-based infrastructure supporting the onboard navigation system and analyzes the impact on the achievable navigation accuracy. For that purpose, the paper starts with an existing navigation architecture based on optical navigation and extends it with measurements to support navigation with ground infrastructure. A scenario of lunar landing is simulated and the provided functions of the ground infrastructure as well as the location with respect to the landing site are evaluated. The results are analyzed and discussed.

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Notes

  1. With the origin in the center of the Moon, z-axis pointing to the North pole, and x- and y-axes spanning the equatorial plane.

  2. Where the downrange direction points in the nominal flight direction, the altitude is aligned along the local vertical and the crossrange is perpendicular to both.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute of Space Systems, GNC Systems Department, Bremen, Germany

    Stephan Theil

  2. Airbus Defence and Space Ltd, Stevenage, England

    Leonardo Bora

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  1. Stephan Theil
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  2. Leonardo Bora
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Correspondence to Stephan Theil.

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Theil, S., Bora, L. Beacons for supporting lunar landing navigation. CEAS Space J 9, 77–95 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12567-016-0132-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12567-016-0132-6

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