Spacecraft Relative Navigation Based on The Converted Measurement Kalman Filter

A simple and effective algorithm is proposed for determining the Relative Mean Orbit Elements (RMOEs). The short distance relative motion of spacecrafts is described by linear differential equations based on RMOEs. The Converted Measurement Kalman Filter (CMKF), which converts nonlinear measurements to the linear ones in the reference Cartesian coordinate frame, is applied to simplify the estimation algorithms of the relative navigation. The numerical simulation demonstrates the algorithm is effective and valid for relative navigation.