ON-BOARD ORBIT DETERMINATION USING SUN SENSOR AND OPTICAL NAVIGATION CAMERA FOR INTERPLANETARY TRAJECTORY

On-board Orbit Determination (OD) using the sun sensor and the Optical Navigation Camera (ONC) for the Autonomous Navigation (AutoNav) is focused on in this paper. In deep space missions, the OD has been performed by Range and Range-Rate (RARR), which is the traditional ground tracking approach by radio wave. The RARR enables the accuracy of the OD to be higher than the other methods. However, such the radio navigation has the inevitable problems, e.g. the delay of radio wave, the reduction of radio wave strength and the transmitter limitation. The influence of these problems becomes significant especially for deep space missions. Furthermore, people must stay and operate the spacecraft on the ground station, which makes the operating cost considerable. Therefore, there has been a growing interest in the AutoNav of the spacecraft in recent years because the AutoNav can solve the above-mentioned problems. The realization of the AutoNav in deep space can eliminate the complexity. of operation on the ground station, and especially it has the significant impact on the operation cost reduction. This paper focuses on the case of the Earth resonant trajectory as an actual mission. The usefulness of the sun observation by sun sensors is discussed for the proposed method. Then, the observation of asteroids is also argued.