Combined optical line-of-sight and crosslink radiometric navigation for distributed deep-space systems.

This manuscript aims to present and evaluate the applicability of combining optical line-of-sight (LoS) navigation with crosslink radiometric navigation for deep-space cruising distributed space systems. To do so, a set of four distributed space systems architectures is presented, and for each of those, the applicability of the combination is evaluated, comparing it to the baseline solutions, which are based on only optical navigation. The comparison is done by studying the performance in a circular heliocentric orbit in seven different time intervals (ranging from 2024 to 2032) and exploiting the observation of all the pairs of planets from Mercury to Saturn.

Design and testing of star tracker algorithms for autonomous optical line-of-sight deep-space navigation.

This paper aims to investigate the capabilities of exploiting optical line-of-sight navigation using star trackers. First, a synthetic image simulator is developed to generate realistic images, which is later exploited to test the star tracker's performance. Then, generic considerations regarding attitude estimation are drawn, highlighting how the camera's characteristics influence the accuracy of the estimation.