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Deep Space Gateway is a NASA program planned to support deep space human exploration and prove new technologies needed to achieve it. One Gateway requirement is the ability to operate in the absence of communications with the Deep Space Network (DSN) for a period of at least three weeks. In this paper, three types of onboard sensors (a camera for optical navigation, a GPS receiver, and X-ray navigation) are considered to enhance its autonomy and reduce the reliance on DSN. A trade study is conducted to explore alternatives on how to achieve autonomy and how to reduce DSN dependency while satisfying navigation performance requirements. Using linear covariance analysis, error budgets, and sensitivity analysis, the performance of navigation systems using combinations of DSN with the aforementioned onboard sensors is shown.

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The problem of synthesizing an optimal sensor selection policy is pertinent to a variety of engineering applications ranging from event detection to autonomous navigation. We consider such a synthesis problem over an infinite time horizon with a discounted cost criterion. We formulate this problem in terms of a value iteration over the continuous space of covariance matrices. To obtain a computationally tractable solution, we subsequently formulate an approximate sensor selection problem, which is solvable through a point-based value iteration over a finite "mesh" of covariance matrices with a user-defined bounded trace. We provide theoretical guarantees bounding the suboptimality of the sensor selection policies synthesized through this method and provide numerical examples comparing them to known results.