ESA GNC Conference Papers Repository

This paper provides a high level description of the navigation architecture for an atmospheric reentry vehicle, which mission is supposed starting at deorbit event at 300km with final autonomous landing on non-instrument runway. The navigation function will be accomplished using a minimum sensor suite composed by an high grade Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) in combination with a GPS receiver only. In this preliminary phase of study, no additional attitude sensor (such as star tracker or magnetometer) is supposed onboard neither Air Data System (ADS). The inertial and the air data are estimated through robust navigation design adopting analytic redundancy approach in order to obtain a failure tolerance behavior with limited use of hardware redundancy.