Marco Sabatini

This paper investigates the performance of the forthcoming lunar navigation satellite systems for estimating not only the position of an onboard receiver in a lunar inertial reference frame but also, and with a consistent accuracy, the relative position between two or more spacecraft in proximity. This could be the case of two spacecraft performing a rendezvous, of a lander released by an orbiter, or the case of the permanent relative navigation service for a formation of satellites around the Moon. The considered observables are the pseudorange and pseudorange-rate measurements provided by the upcoming lunar communication and navigation system (LCNS), expected to support lunar missions. A single-stage Kalman filter is implemented, and its performance is demonstrated through error statistics, which are then compared to what can be achieved with sequential filtering.