Related papers: Review of X-ray pulsar spacecraft autonomous navig…
Shemar et al. (2016) presented results based on the output of a feasibility study for the European Space Agency (ESA) on the use of X-ray pulsars for deep space navigation, a concept often referred to as 'XNAV'. Here we describe some of the…
The X-ray Navigation and Autonomous position Verification (XNAV) is tested which use the Crab pulsar under the Space Test Program that use starlight refraction. It provide the way that the spacecraft could autonomously determine its…
This chapter describes the development of X-ray Navigation at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) within its astrophysics research programs. The prospects for applications emerged from early discoveries of X-ray source classes and their…
Pulsars have at least two impressive applications. First, they can be used as highly accurate clocks, comparable in stability to atomic clocks; secondly, a small subset of pulsars, millisecond X-ray pulsars, provide all the necessary…
Current space missions primarily depend on Earth-based Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) systems involving human-in-the-loop operations. X-ray pulsar-based navigation offers a promising alternative by using the very precise periodic…
Recent advances with space navigation technologies developed by NASA in space-based atomic clocks and pulsar X-ray navigation combined with past successes in autonomous navigation using optical imaging, brings to the forefront the need to…
Usually, positions of spacecraft on interplanetary or deep space missions are determined by radar tracking from ground stations, a method by which uncertainty increases with distance from Earth. As an alternative, a spacecraft equipped with…
An external reference system suitable for deep space navigation can be defined by fast spinning and strongly magnetized neutron stars, called pulsars. Their beamed periodic signals have timing stabilities comparable to atomic clocks and…
We discuss the possibility of an autonomous navigation system for spacecraft that is based on pulsar timing data. Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars that are observable as variable celestial sources of electromagnetic radiation.…
The Station Explorer for X-ray Timing and Navigation Technology (SEXTANT) is a technology demonstration enhancement to the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) mission, which is scheduled to launch in 2017 and will be hosted…
The recent flight experiments with Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (\textit{NICER}) and \textit{Insight}-Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope (\textit{Insight}-HXMT) have demonstrated the feasibility of X-ray pulsar-based navigation…
Autonomous spacecraft relative navigation technology has been planned for and applied to many famous space missions. The development of on-board electronics systems has enabled the use of vision-based and LiDAR-based methods to achieve…
Detecting the X-ray radialization of pulsars and obtaining the photons' time of arrival are the foundation steps in autonomous navigation via X-ray pulsar measurement. The precision of a pulse' s time of arrival is mainly decided by the…
In this work, we report the in-orbit demonstration of X-ray pulsar navigation with Insight-Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope (Insight-HXMT), which was launched on Jun. 15th, 2017. The new pulsar navigation method 'Significance Enhancement of…
At present, there is a great worldwide interest in the development of technologies that allow information about the X-ray emission from pulsating cosmic sources to be used to obtain navigation solutions for deep-space spacecraft. In this…
Pulsars are natural cosmic clocks. On long timescales they rival the precision of terrestrial atomic clocks. Using a technique called pulsar timing, the exact measurement of pulse arrival times allows a number of applications, ranging from…
The surge of deep-space probes makes it unsustainable to navigate them with standard radiometric tracking. Self-driving interplanetary satellites represent a solution to this problem. In this work, a full vision-based navigation algorithm…
XAssist is a NASA AISR-funded project for the automation of X-ray astrophysics, with emphasis on galaxies. It is nearing completion of its initially funded effort, and is working well for Chandra and ROSAT HRI data. Initial support for…
We demonstrate how observations of pulsars can be used to help navigate a spacecraft travelling in the solar system. We make use of archival observations of millisecond pulsars from the Parkes radio telescope in order to demonstrate the…
A critical challenge in deploying unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for autonomous tasks is their ability to navigate in an unknown environment. This paper introduces a novel vision-depth fusion approach for autonomous navigation on…