Multi-path navigation method using solar panel-reflected solar oscillations for Earth satellites

This study explores a new navigation method using multi-path solar panel-reflected solar oscillations. Considering the solar panels of BeiDou-3 M1–M24 and GPS satellites as examples, the simulations show that the mean position error of FY-1 using solar panel-reflected solar oscillations is only 20.61 m in 30 days. Compared with the existing autonomous navigation methods for the Earth satellites, the newly proposed method has two advantages. (1) It has the highest navigation accuracy. (2) It does not require any additional accurate geomagnetic map, gravity gradient map, or refraction model. While the proposed method requires at least two atomic frequency discriminators to obtain the measurements and its accuracy is affected by the geometric relationship between the Earth satellite, reflected satellite, and Sun, which are the inherent drawbacks of the method. It is notable that the influence of the relativistic effects on the measurement accuracy needs further research.