TRAJECTORY DETERMINATION WITH UNKNOWN PERTURBATIONS
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In this paper a new approach to estimate the trajectory of a spacecraft based on observations of a known body and on a dynamics environment difficult or impossible to model is presented. One example is observing the Moon in a cislunar trajectory in presence of perturbations difficult to model (solar pressure, pipe leaking, etc.). The trajectory is estimated by a nonrational Bzier function, whose control points and parameters are derived using least-squares. JPL-SPICE and GSFC-GMAT software have been used for simulations. This approach has the advantage of not requiring any knowledge of the dynamics, which gives it great generality. The method has been compared with iterative batch least-squares, requiring knowledge of the dynamics and perturbations, and who obtain trajectory estimates by numerical integration of the equation of motion. One motivation is to obtain autonomy for trajectory estimation on cislunar trajectories to guarantee accurate navigation in case of communications loss. While the image processing is the subject of the companion paper, this paper presents an analysis of this new trajectory estimator.
