Determination of Local Vortical in Celestial Navigation Systems

Determination of the local vertical is not trivial for a moving vehicle and in general will require corrections for the Earth geophysical deflection. The vehicle's local vertical can be estimated by INS integration with initial alignment in SDINS(Strap Down INS) system. In general, the INS has drift error and it cause the performance degradation. In order to compensate the drift error, GPS/INS augmented system is widely used. And in the event that GPS is denied or unavailable, celestial navigation using star tracker can be a backup navigation system especially for the military purpose. In this celestial navigation system, the vehicle's position determination can be achieved using more than two star trackers, and the accuracy of position highly depends on accuracy of local vertical direction. Modern tilt sensors or accelerometers are sensitive to the direction of gravity to arc second(or better) precision. The local gravity provides the direction orthogonal to the geoid and, appropriately corrected, toward the center of the Earth. In this paper the relationship between direction of center of the Earth and actual gravity direction caused by geophysical deflection was analyzed by using precision orbit simulation program embedded the JGM-3 geoid model. And the result was verified and evaluated with mathematical gravity vector model derived from gravitational potential of the Earth. And also for application purpose, the performance variation of pure INS navigation system was analyzed by applying precise gravity model.

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