On-Orbit Small-Satellite Localization

Autonomous Range-Only Navigation for Satellite Formations

PY4 is a constellation of four 1.5U CubeSats launched on SpaceX Transporter 10 on March 4, 2024, in a collaboration between Carnegie Mellon University and NASA Ames Research Center. I personally contributed to the GNC stack of the mission, primarily responsible for the successful demonstration of range-only orbit determination between 2 of our 4 satellites.

The four PY4 satellites, a collaboration between Carnegie Mellon University and NASA Ames Research Center, were launched on March 4, 2024 on the SpaceX Transporter 10 mission and deployed on a sun-synchronous orbit. The 1.5U satellites demonstrated a suite of novel navigation and control algorithms for low-cost platforms.

Abstract: The availability of low-cost small satellites and commercial launch services has enabled a proliferation of distributed small satellite missions. However, these missions require precise relative navigation, traditionally provided by expensive GNSS receivers that are limited to operation in low-Earth orbit. In this paper, we introduce a novel, scalable, cost-effective navigation method for both absolute and relative orbit determination that is suitable for resource-constrained small-satellite formations. Our approach combines inter-satellite ranging, a single “anchor” satellite with global measurements, and a highly accurate dynamics model in a nonlinear least-squares estimator. We demonstrate that our estimator can resolve the full orbital states of all spacecraft in a formation despite the inherent ambiguities of range-only navigation. We evaluated our method through numerical experiments with varied network topologies and an on-orbit demonstration during the PY4 satellite mission, achieving absolute positioning accuracy of 0.21m for the anchor satellite and 0.33m for the non-anchor satellite.

References

2025

  1. relative_ranging.png
    On-Orbit Demonstration of Range-Only Navigation for Small Satellite Formations
    Ibrahima S. Sow, and Zachary Manchester
    IEEE Aerospace Conference, Mar 2025

2024

  1. Py4_pic.jpeg
    The PY4 Mission: A Low-Cost Demonstration of CubeSat Formation-Flying Technologies
    Max Holliday, Rachel Ticknor, Jan Stupl, Roger Hunter, Paulo Fisch, Ibrahima S. Sow, Jacob Willis, and Zachary Manchester
    In AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites (SmallSat), Aug 2024