On-board orbit determination for application satellites

Abstract

A proposal for onboard orbit determination which would rely entirely on reference Doppler beacons located within the Continental United States is presented. Algorithms were conceived which were compatible with small computing machines and sufficiently accurate to maintain an adequate satellite ephemeris. An on board computer equipped with a recursive filter with a fading memory to account for dynamic modeling errors and two reference beacons was found to be necessary for the system to work.