Navigation strategy with the spacecraft communications blackout for Mars entry

Future Mars missions require precision entry navigation capability, especially in the presence of communications blackout. On the mission of Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), there was a 70-s communications blackout period during atmospheric entry phase. In allusion to the spacecraft communications blackout encountered, this paper predicts an upper-bound for any possible blackout period firstly, improves the default integrated navigation measurements based on IMU and surface radiometric beacons, and proposes innovative attitude observation model based on IMU and range observation model based on orbiters finally. To verify the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed observation models in the presence of communications blackout, unscented Kalman filter is utilized to demonstrate the navigation performance. The results show that navigation errors based on improved observation models proposed in this paper degrade an order of magnitude compared with the default observation models even if the communications blackout takes place, which satisfies the requirements of future Mars landing missions.