Metric Tracking of Launch Vehicles

NASA needs reliable, accurate navigation for launch vehicles and other missions. GPS is the best world-wide navigation system, but operates at low power making it susceptible to intentional and unintentional interference. Toyon proposes to develop an anti-jam front-end that uses Space-Time Adaptive Processing to suppress interference, and implement it in a compact, low-cost package. This design will work with any existing GPS receiver, although higher performance can be achieved by tightly integrating a GPS receiver module with the anti-jam functionality. Toyon's Miniature Integrated Direction-finding Attitude-determining Anti-jam System (MIDAAS(TM)) obtains position, velocity, attitude, and time (PVAT) measurements directly from GPS signals. The ultra-tightly coupled (UTC) navigation architecture fuses all sensor data. Integrating this system with the anti-jam module makes the system inherently robust to interference and the resulting position and attitude estimate more accurate. More »