Drag derived altitude aided navigation method

The navigation problem of the lifting reentry vehicles has attracted much research interest in the past decade. This paper researches the navigation in the blackout zone during the reentry phase of the aircraft, when the communication signals are attenuated and even interrupted by the blackout zone. However, when calculating altitude, a pure classic inertial navigation algorithm appears imprecise and divergent. In order to obtain a more precise aircraft altitude, this paper applies an integrated navigation method based on inertial navigation algorithms, which uses drag derived altitude to aid the inertial navigation during the blackout zone. This method can overcome the shortcomings of the inertial navigation system and improve the navigation accuracy. To further improve the navigation accuracy, the applicable condition and the main error factors, such as the atmospheric coefficient error and drag coefficient error are analyzed in detail. Then the damping circuit design of the navigation control system and the damping coefficients determination is introduced. The feasibility of the method is verified by the typical reentry trajectory simulation, and the influence of the iterative times on the accuracy is analyzed. Simulation results show that iterative three times achieves the best effect.