Multi-View Joint Target Selection for Relativistic-Perturbed Starlight Navigation

Autonomous navigation is one of the key technologies for spacecraft to realize long-term space operation and carry out science missions. In order to meet the requirement of high precision autonomous navigation, the effects of the gravitational deflection of light, stellar aberration and measurement bias of sensor are considered to establish a relativistic-perturbed starlight navigation scheme. To obtain high quality measurements, a multi-probe star sensor composed of multiple field of view probes is adopted for observation. A polygonal star pair selection method is proposed to conduct multi-view joint target selection. By constructing irregular polygons to select high quality star pair observations, the accuracy of navigation estimation is expected to be improved. The performance of relativistic-perturbed starlight navigation using the multi-view joint target selection method is then verified through a numerical simulation.