Abstract

Deep-space missions have gained significant attention these days. Due to the limited availability of the Deep Space Network (DSN), autonomy of navigation in deep space missions have become more important. Optical Inter-Satellite Links (OISL) offer a promising solution for both operations and navigation due to their high communication capacity and the high accuracy of measuring range and bearing angles, which aid high-precision cooperative navigation. A major limitation of OISL in deep-space missions is the requirement for large telescopes, which restricts satellites to maintaining only a single communication path. The resulting sparse communication network requires satellites to distributedly select commu- nication links and estimate states with limited and delayed information. This constraint impacts the scalability of the constellations and necessitates careful design of the network graph among the satellites to preserve navigation accuracy. This study proposes a fully decentralized algorithm for deep-space cooperative navigation with single OISL and evaluates the impact of information delays on the navigation accuracy and scalability of the system.

Proposed Architecture

Simulation Result

Position errors typically range from 1 to 80 kilometers - a level of accuracy that is more than adequate for deep-space navigation during cruise phases. This performance validates the effectiveness of our proposed cooperative navigation approach using constrained optical inter-satellite links.