Abstract: | Several infrastructures are being developed to support lunar navigation. One of these is the Moonlight programme of European Space Agency, in which dedicated lunar orbiting payloads provide a navigation signal. These signals can be used in addition to the existing Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals to provide a position for users on the Moon. A service volume simulation pipeline has been set-up that simulates the availability of a position solution taking into account amongst others the position of the celestial bodies, satellite orientations, realistic antenna patterns, link budget, ephemeris decoding and frequency dependencies. When a position solution is available, its integrity can be determined using the Advanced Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring algorithm. The protection levels that are bounding the position error depend on local user error as well as signal-in-space characteristics and integrity budget allocations. Values that are valid for current GNSS and satellites to be deployed in elliptical lunar frozen orbits (ELFO) are implemented. The simulations are conducted for a range of time windows, in which orbits are repeating and Earth viewing angles and range on the south-pole vary from favourable to worst-case. The results show that the use of the L2/E5 frequency is favourable in combination with low demodulation thresholds from the F/NAV and CNAV navigation signals. The best case protection levels that can be achieved are in the order of 100m with single point processing. They are very sensitive to the choice of integrity budget and operational window. Depending on the time, windows exist where the ELFO satellites do not provide enough visibility on the south-pole and around these time windows the protection levels worsen significantly. In order to bridge availability gaps and tighten integrity bounds, some recommendations are provided. |
Published in: |
Proceedings of the ION 2024 Pacific PNT Meeting April 15 - 18, 2024 Hilton Waikiki Beach Honolulu, Hawaii |
Pages: | 908 - 921 |
Cite this article: | Engwerda, Heiko J. A., Menzione, Francesco, Swinden, Richard, de Haag, Maarten Uijt, Ventura-Traveset, Javier, Melman, Floor, "Evaluation of Positioning Integrity through ARAIM at the Lunar Surface," Proceedings of the ION 2024 Pacific PNT Meeting, Honolulu, Hawaii, April 2024, pp. 908-921. https://doi.org/10.33012/2024.19665 |
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