MCAV/IMU integrated navigation for the powered descent phase of Mars EDL

Pin-point landing is considered as a key technology for future manned Mars landing and Mars base missions. The traditional inertial navigation system (INS) based guidance, navigation and control (GNC) mode used in the Mars entry, descent and landing (EDL) phase has no ability to achieve the precise and safe Mars landing, so novel EDL GNC methodologies should be investigated to meet this goal. This paper proposes the MCAV/IMU integrated navigation scheme for the powered descent phase of Mars EDL. The Miniature Coherent Altimeter and Velocimeter (MCAV) is adopted to correct the inertial bias and drift and improve the performance of integrated navigation. Altitude and velocity information derived from MCAV and the lander’s state information sensed by inertial measurement unit (IMU) are integrated in extended Kalman filter algorithm. The validity of the proposed navigation scheme is confirmed by computer simulation.