Autonomous Navigation for Crewed Lunar Missions with DBAN

• Main Authors: Jun, William W., Cheung, Kar-Ming, Milton, Julia, Lightsey, E. Glenn, Lee, Charles
• Other Authors: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Georgia Institute of Technology. Space Systems Design Lab
• Format: Report
• Language: unknown
• Published: Georgia Institute of Technology 2020
• Subjects: South pole
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/1853/74047

Presented at the 2020 IEEE Aerospace Conference in Big Sky, MT. With the recent push for a crewed Lunar mission to descend, land, and ascend from the Moon, there is a need for real-time position, velocity, and orientation knowledge of a Lunar spacecraft. Proposed approaches to achieve this include the use of weak-signals received from GPS and Deep Space Network (DSN)-aided measurements, but these all require significant hardware development and active tracking from multiple ground stations. Additionally, these solutions may be unavailable during close approach and landing. This paper extends the previously published relative Doppler-based positioning scheme (Law of Cosines – LOC) and an absolute Doppler-based scheme (Conic Doppler Localization – CDL) with the aid of range measurements and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) to create the Doppler Based Autonomous Navigation (DBAN) architecture. DBAN allows for real-time, autonomous positioning with as few as one Lunar orbiter and a reference station on the surface of the Moon. The LOC scheme is a relative navigation architecture that converts Doppler measurements into Doppler-based range measurements with the aid of a reference station and at least one satellite. In addition, the CDL scheme is an absolute navigation architecture that converts Doppler measurements into conic sections for angle-based positioning. These schemes allow for localization with solely Doppler measurements that can be made using existing hardware, with significant performance improvements when including range measurements. However, the existing drawback with these schemes is that they require a static user; they can be biased through the Doppler shift produced by a dynamic user. However, with the aid of range measurements, an IMU, and a non-linear Kalman filter, DBAN can correct these biases and provide continuous Doppler-based navigation. In this analysis, the Lunar Gateway and the Lunar Relay Satellite (LRS) were used with a pre-existing reference station located on the south pole of ...