Abstract:

To satisfy the relative navigation of formation flying spacecrafts， a novel method of interspacecraft ranging is presented based on the observations of pulsars. According to the method the interspacecraft range projected in the direction of pulsars can be directly determined by correlating the pulsar signals detected on different spacecrafts in a formation flying system. Meanwhile the accuracy of the method is derived based on the analysis of the celestial sources and their spectrums. Finally the method is evaluated using the realistic simulation of the orbit information of formation flying spacecrafts. The result verifies the feasibility of the proposed method and is effective in the application of the future formation flying system.