GPS Receiver Architecture and Expected Performance for Autonomous GPS Navigation in Highly Eccentric Orbits

Michael Moreau, Penina Axelrad, James L. Garrison, David Kelbel, Anne Long

Abstract:	A growing number of science missions call for autonomous spacecraft navigation or formation flying capabilities in highly eccentric orbits (HEO). A study of GPS receiver architectures designed to enable the application of GPS to these types of missions is presented. These HEO receiver architectures are based upon the Goddard Space Flight Center's (GSFC) PiVoT receiver hardware. It features a robust navigation filter coupled with customizations to the satellite selection and acquisition algorithms, and improvements to the tracking loop design to enable improved tracking of weak GPS signals. Several weak signal tracking techniques appearing in the literature are potentially applicable to reduce the tracking threshold and to improve GPS signal visibility in HEO applications. The performance improvement achieved by weak signal tracking is simulated for several characteristic HEO missions. The GPS signal visibility and navigation solution accuracy are compared considering different assumed values for the tracking threshold of the receiver. For a scenario exhibiting very poor GPS visibility, modest reductions in receiver tracking threshold of only 5 to 7 dB are shown to result in a 50 to 60 percent reduction in root-mean-square (RMS) navigation position and velocity errors.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of The Institute of Navigation (1999) June 27 - 30, 1999 Royal Sonesta Hotel Cambridge, MA
Pages:	653 - 665
Cite this article:	Moreau, Michael, Axelrad, Penina, Garrison, James L., Kelbel, David, Long, Anne, "GPS Receiver Architecture and Expected Performance for Autonomous GPS Navigation in Highly Eccentric Orbits," Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of The Institute of Navigation (1999), Cambridge, MA, June 1999, pp. 653-665.
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