Attitude and position determination scheme of lunar rovers basing on the celestial vectors observation

In lunar exploration mission, it is very critical to determine the attitude and position of the lunar rover with a high degree of accuracy both for exploration achievement of scientific goals and for safe navigation. In this paper we address the problem of determining the attitude and position on the moon surface and provide a celestial navigation algorithm for lunar rover autonomous navigation. A CCD sun sensor is used to provide lunar rovers a vector observation by sun imaging and sun vector is computed in the lunar navigation frame using ephemeris data. A CCD earth sensor is designed to provide another vector observation, the image processing and earth centroid computation based on nonlinear least square is described. Finally, the attitude estimate using q-method and the position propagation is presented, simulation experiments are conducted, that corroborate the presented algorithm.