Print Email Facebook Twitter Match filtering approach for signal acquisition in radio-pulsar navigation Title Match filtering approach for signal acquisition in radio-pulsar navigation Author Heusdens, R. Engelen, S. Buist, P.J. Noroozi, A. Sundaramoorthy, P.P. Verhoeven, C.J.M. Bentum, M. Gill, E.K.A. Faculty Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science Department Intelligent Systems Date 2012-12-31 Abstract Pulsars with their periodic pulses and known positions are ideal beacons for navigation. The challenge, however, is the detection of the very weak pulsar signals that are submerged in noise. Radio based approaches allow the use of advanced techniques and methods for the detection and acquisition of such weak signals. In this paper, an effective signal acquisition method based on epoch folding and matched filtering is proposed that can enable pulsar navigation on spacecraft. Traditionally astronomers use an epoch folding algorithm to search for new pulsars which is a very time and processing power-consuming approach. Since a pulsar navigation system uses signals from known pulsars, advanced algorithms can reduce the time and processing power required for pulsar detection. Applying optimization methods on folding algorithms could lead to an increase in detection speed, however, it is not practical when taking all known signal parameters into account. In this paper a new approach is proposed to reduce the time and processing power further, considering a-priori knowledge such as pulse shape. This approach is based on the concept of matched filtering. Matched filtering is the basic tool for extracting known wavelets from a signal that has been contaminated by noise. A matched filter is obtained by correlating the observation with a template of a known signal, to detect its presence. Such a matched filter is the optimal linear filter for maximizing the signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) in the presence of additive stochastic noise. After a description of the underlying theory, simulations shows that by using this method, significant increases in detection speeds are possible. To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:1082da9a-4c7c-4ab5-b4d9-d88299833814 Publisher IAF International Astronautical Federation Source Proceedings of the 63rd International Astronautical Congress IAC 2012, Naples, Italy, 1-5 Oct. 2012 Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type conference paper Rights (c) 2012 The Authors Files PDF 284635.pdf 845.18 KB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:1082da9a-4c7c-4ab5-b4d9-d88299833814/datastream/OBJ/view