AUTONOMOUS GPS INS NAVIGATION EXPERIMENT FOR SPACE TRANSFER VEHICLE/

An experiment is described to validate the concept of developing an au tonomous integrated spacecraft navigation system using onboard Global Positioning System (GPS) and Inertial Navigation System (INS) measurem ents. Previous work by the authors [1, 2] have demonstrated the feasib ility of integrating GPS measurements with INS measurements to provide a total improvement in spacecraft navigation performance, i.e., impro vement in position, velocity and attitude informatiom An important asp ect of this research is the automatic real-time reconfiguration capabi lity of the system designed to respond to changes in a spacecraft miss ion under the control of an expert system.