Autonomous Optical Navigation Using Very Short-Arc Observations of a Single Near-Earth Satellite

This paper proposes a practical design of an autonomous optical navigation system for ultra-low orbit vehicles, offering an innovative solution to address the accumulation of satellite ephemeris errors. An emerging scenario is treated in which only one individual near-Earth satellite can be captured during each encountering period through a star tracker. When background stars are used to determine the attitude, the line-of-sight measurements of the observed satellite are extracted for flight vehicle positioning. To overcome the problem of gradually increasing satellite ephemeris errors over time, a method through sequential two-pass observations of a single satellite is proposed, which enables simultaneous estimation of the vehicle state and correction of the satellite position error. Some representative scenarios are simulated to illustrate the performance of the proposed algorithm. Results show that the autonomous optical navigation system can achieve sufficient accuracy using the very short-arc observations of a single target satellite.