Hyper-X Post-Flight Trajectory Reconstruction

Abstract

This paper discusses the formulation and development of a trajectory reconstruction tool for the NASA X-43A/Hyper-X high speed research vehicle, and its implementation for the reconstruction and analysis of flight test data. Extended Kalman filtering techniques are employed to reconstruct the trajectory of the vehicle, based upon numerical integration of inertial measurement data along with redundant measurements of the vehicle state. The equations of motion are formulated in order to include the effects of several systematic error sources, whose values may also be estimated by the filtering routines. Additionally, smoothing algorithms have been implemented in which the final value of the state (or an augmented state that includes other systematic error parameters to be estimated) and covariance are propagated back to the initial time to generate the best-estimated trajectory, based upon all available data. The methods are applied to the problem of reconstructing the trajectory of the Hyper-X vehicle from flight data.

Mars Entry Atmospheric Data System Modeling and Algorithm Development

“…The state predictions from one measurement point to the next are computed using numerical integration of the nonlinear dynamic model in Eqs. (20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30)(31). The covariance predictions are propagated according to the matrix differential equatioṅ…”

“…The IMU measurement error model for the Kalman filtering approach is described in Ref. 22. In both cases, systematic error parameters and noise uncertainty inputs to the models are described in Ref.…”

A new tightly-coupled INS/CNS integrated navigation algorithm with weighted multi-stars observations

“…A simulated typical maneuver flight trajectory is shown in Figure 3, which consists of different kinds of flight conditions such as take-off, climbing, varying speed, horizontal flying, turning, and so on. Moreover, a hypersonic flight trajectory of HCV is simulated with the reference of X-43 second flight test, 26,27 as shown in Figure 4. The cruise altitude is 32,000–38,000 m, and the maximum speed is 10 Ma.…”

Adaptive Huber-Based Filter for Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle Navigation

“…The navigation for HCV is an interesting and challenging task since it brings lots of new problems. The modeling of such a system working at high speed (Mach 5~10) in near space (20~40 km) can be quite difficult, bringing challenges to the application of model-relayed conventional KF [3,4]. When precise knowledge on the models are not available, adaptive KF (AKF) has been intensively investigated for tuning the filter continuously, so as to prevent divergence and improve filtering performance.…”