A Novel Autonomous Celestial Navigation Method Using Solar Oscillation Time Delay Measurement

Solar oscillations cause significant variations in sunlight spectral wavelength and intensity over short time periods. These oscillations have been studied in detail over the years, both theoretically and using actual observations. Through detecting the sunlight spectral central wavelengths and intensity and recording the moment when solar oscillation occurs, the time delay between the sunlight coming from the Sun directly and the sunlight reflected by a celestial body such as the satellite of a planet or asteroid can be obtained. Because the solar oscillation time delay is determined by the relative positions of the spacecraft, the reflective celestial body, and the Sun, it can be adopted as the navigation measurement to provide the spacecraft's position information. In this paper, a novel celestial navigation method using the solar oscillation time delay measurement is proposed. The implicit measurement model of time delay is built, and the implicit unscented Kalman filter is applied. Simulation results indicate that the position error and velocity error of the proposed method for the transfer orbit are about 3.55 km and 0.077 m/s, respectively, and those for the surrounding orbit are about 1.76 km and 1.57 m/s, respectively. The impact of four factors on the navigation performance is also investigated.