Performance Under Intermittent or Sparse Surface-Station Visibility

Evaluate the positioning performance of the surface-station-enabled radiometric navigation architecture when surface-station-to-rover visibility is intermittent or sparse rather than nearly continuous.

Background

The simulated rover trajectory was deliberately designed to prioritize line-of-sight availability between the surface station and rover, producing 99.77% line-of-sight availability for the final high-rate trajectory. Consequently, the reported positioning improvements characterize a favorable visibility scenario.

Operational lunar traverses may encounter terrain blockage and substantially longer periods without surface-station ranging. The effect of such intermittent or sparse visibility on DOWR-bias estimation, radiometric update availability, sensor-fusion drift, and vertical positioning accuracy was not resolved by the simulations.