METHOD OF DETERMINING ORIENTATION OF SPACECRAFT BASED ON SIGNALS OF NAVIGATION SATELLITES Russian patent published in 2020 - IPC G01C21/24 

FIELD: astronautics.

SUBSTANCE: present invention relates to navigation of spacecrafts. Method for determining angular orientation of a spacecraft from signals of navigation satellites (NS) includes emitting radio signals from a NS with known orbital parameters, generating and issuing commands for receiving signals of selected NS on channels of a receiving device mounted on a spacecraft, allocating each channel of a receiver from the total signal of all the signals of the satellites corresponding to the issued commands and reception of these signals under condition of location of corresponding satellites in field of view of one of n antennas of receiving device with known unitary nonparallel vectors of directions of central axes of antennae relative to associated spacecraft coordinate system. Determination of current coordinates of spacecraft on received signals of NS, measurement of integral phases of the same j^th NS from common constellation of satellites visible by i^th pair of antennae. At that, necessity of phase uncertainty elimination is eliminated due to performance of series of phase measurements at spacecraft stabilization by increments of integral phases of the same NS of current constellation of i^th pair of antennae. Orientation is determined at the moment of the first measurement of the series and is converted to the current moment in time.

EFFECT: technical result consists in determining orientation of spacecraft only from measurements of satellite navigation equipment (SNE) without using measurements from other systems in arbitrary unknown orientation of spacecraft.

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