Relative Navigation in LEO by Carrier-Phase Differential GPS with Intersatellite Ranging Augmentation

Carrier-phase differential GPS (CDGPS) is a promising technology for accurate relative navigation in LEO formations of cooperating satellites, but navigation filter robustness against poor GPS geometry and noisy measurements has to be improved. This can be performed by augmenting the navigation filter with intersatellite local ranging measurements, as the ones provided by ranging transponders or GNSS-like systems. In this paper, an augmented CDGPS navigation filter is proposed for the formation of two satellites characterized by a short, varying baseline, relevant to next generation Synthetic Aperture Radar missions. Specifically, a cascade-combination of dynamic and kinematic filters which processes double-differenced code and carrier measurements on two frequencies, as well as local inter-satellite ranging measurements, is used to get centimeter-level baseline estimates. The augmented filter is validated by numerical simulations of the formation orbital path. Results demonstrate that the proposed approach is effective in preserving the centimeter-level accuracy achievable by a CDGPS-only filter also in the presence of a poor GDOP or a limited number of GPS satellites in view