Methods for Navigation in the Nearby Interstellar Medium
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Abstract
Recent years have seen an increased interest in sending dedicated spacecraft to explore the nearby
interstellar medium (NISM). Such a mission would be instrumented to study the so-called heliosphere
on the outskirts of our Solar System, where the solar wind and helopspheric magnetic field interact with
interstellar environment (e.g., cosmic radiation). While the scientific value of such a mission is clear, the
design and operation of a spacecraft to accomplish this mission is difficult. Indeed, due to the immense
distances involved, navigation is expected to be amongst the most challenging tasks. This work explores
a variety of navigation observables and frameworks that one might use to navigate a mission within
the NISM. Detailed models are presented for all of the major sources of navigation information, including Earth-based radiometric tracking, visible-spectrum star sightings, X-ray pulsar navigation (XNAV),
StarNAV, and others. The utility of these observables is then studied within an orbit determination
framework, along with consideration of the quality of state knowledge most likely required to operate in
the NISM. Issues related to time-keeping are also discussed. Numerical results are presented as a way to
illustrate the efficacy of various approaches.
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2022-09
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