Lunar surface station improves rover vertical and horizontal positioning accuracy
Enhancing Lunar PNT Performance Through Surface Station Enabled Radiometric Observables
Robotics
Summary
Positioning rovers accurately on the Moon is tough, especially vertically, because there are few satellites and their positions make it hard to get clear signals. The authors studied how adding a special station on the Moon's surface can help by sharing signals and measuring distances directly with the rover. Their tests show this setup can reduce rover position errors from about 30 meters to under 5 meters. This improvement is important for safe and reliable rover movements in future Moon missions.
What this means in practice
- •For space mission planners: Enhance autonomous lunar rover navigation by integrating surface stations for improved vertical and horizontal positioning accuracy during early constellation deployment.
- •For satellite communication engineers: Design lunar surface stations that provide complementary ranging and navigation support in addition to communication functions to bolster rover mission safety.
Authors
Toshiki Tanaka, Satoshi Ikari
Abstract
Future lunar surface missions require reliable positioning for autonomous rover operations. Lunar navigation satellite systems may provide limited vertical positioning accuracy due to satellite availability and observation geometry, particularly during early deployment. This study investigates a radiometric navigation architecture in which a lunar surface station (SS) improves rover positioning through double-differenced satellite observations and additional surface-to-surface ranging. Pseudorange and Doppler measurements from lunar navigation satellites are used for relative positioning between the SS and rover, while dual one-way ranging (DOWR) provides an additional range observable. The radiometric solution is integrated with rover dead-reckoning information. Monte Carlo simulations were conducted using five satellites representative of NASA's Lunar Communications Relay and Navigation Systems (LCRNS) constellation and a rover trajectory near Connecting Ridge at the lunar south pole. The results show that the SS improves horizontal and vertical relative positioning, with further gains from DOWR. In the simulated scenario, the mean 99.7% vertical positioning error decreased from 29.9 m without the SS to 5.5 m with double-differenced pseudorange and Doppler processing, and to 4.8 m with DOWR. An uncorrected DOWR hardware bias significantly degraded positioning, whereas the proposed bias-estimation method achieved a final estimation error of 0.058 +/- 0.057 m. The benefit of DOWR also depended on observation geometry. These results demonstrate the potential of a lunar surface station to improve vertical relative positioning through direct radiometric ranging, complementing its communication and navigation support roles.