Improved Navigation for Highly Dynamic Environments

Spacecraft missions are more commonly entering highly dynamic environments, such as lunar libration orbits, orbits about small bodies, and orbits driven by low-thrust propulsion. Advanced Space proposes to develop a robust navigation filter optimized for each of these highly dynamic environments. Further, the tool will be designed to be open-source and work with tools such as NASA's General Mission Analysis Tool (GMAT). The dynamic filter will implement state-of-the-art process noise strategies tuned for dynamic environments. These process noise strategies, combined with an extended Kalman filter, will permit the filter to operate on very long arcs without resets, to operate on unstable trajectories, and to operate on trajectories propagated in undetermined systems, such as in the vicinity of an uncharacterized asteroid. The filter will estimate unmodeled accelerations, tuned to be sensitive to the uncertainties present in each of these highly dynamic environments.