Abstract: This paper studies the autonomous navigation method based on the range measurement between an Earth satellite and a Lunar satellite. The absolute positions of all participating satellites can be determined simultaneously by using the threebody orbital dynamics and the intersatellite range measurement. However, the positioning performance of the navigation may be degraded in the presence of large initial position error. In order to cope with this problem, a novel navigation method is proposed by integrating an ultraviolet navigation sensor and the intersatellite range measurement. By using the proposed navigation method, high positioning accuracy is achievable in the presence of the large initial position error and large measurement noise of the ultraviolet sensor. The performance of the integrated navigation system is analyzed by using the CramerRao lower bound (CRLB). The feasibility of the proposed method is verified via numerical simulations.

Key words: autonomous navigation, intersatellite range measurement, ultraviolet navigation sensor, threebody orbital dynamics