Lunar Surface Receiver Clock Synchronization Using GNSS and Satellite Nadir Angle

Abstract

The use of signals from Earth-orbiting Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) constellations for positioning, navigation, and timing on the lunar surface was recently demonstrated by the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) aboard Blue Ghost Mission 1. For receiver clock synchronization using GNSS, Kalman filter performance depends on the satellite-specific measurement uncertainty used to construct the measurement noise covariance. Terrestrial measurement weighting commonly relies on receiver elevation angle, but the elevation angles in the analyzed LuGRE data are confined to 24.2-31.5 degrees, providing limited discrimination of measurement quality. In contrast, satellite nadir angles span 12.1-66.6 degrees, and the measurement variability increases substantially at small nadir angles. Based on this observation, we propose a measurement weighting model that combines satellite nadir angle with C/N0 for lunar surface receiver clock synchronization. The proposed model is evaluated against three weighting methods adopted from the literature using seven LuGRE operation periods (OPs). It achieves the lowest receiver clock bias root mean square error (RMSE) in six of the seven OPs and an overall RMSE of 5.78 m, which is 19.5% lower than that of the best comparison model. The proposed model also provides the lowest clock bias prediction RMSE under simulated measurement outages.