A fast pulse phase estimation method for X-ray pulsar signals based on epoch folding

作     者：Xue Mengfan Li Xiaoping Sun Haifeng Fang Haiyan 

作者机构：School of Aerospace Science and TechnologyXidian University 

出 版 物：《Chinese Journal of Aeronautics》 (中国航空学报（英文版）)

年 卷 期：2016年第29卷第3期

页      面：746-753页

核心收录：

学科分类：07[理学] 08[工学] 081105[工学-导航、制导与控制] 070402[理学-天体测量与天体力学] 0802[工学-机械工程] 0704[理学-天文学] 0825[工学-航空宇航科学与技术] 0811[工学-控制科学与工程] 0801[工学-力学（可授工学、理学学位）] 

基　　金：supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(No.61301173) 

主　　题：Epoch folding Maximum likelihoodPhase estimation X-ray pulsar X-ray pulsar-basednavigation （XPNAV） 

摘      要：X-ray pulsar-based navigation （XPNAV） is an attractive method for autonomous deep- space navigation in the future. The pulse phase estimation is a key task in XPNAV and its accuracy directly determines the navigation accuracy. State-of-the-art pulse phase estimation techniques either suffer from poor estimation accuracy, or involve tile maximization of generally non- convex object function, thus resulting in a large computational cost. In this paper, a fasl pulse phase estimation method based on epoch folding is presented. The statistical properties of the observed profle obtained through epoch folding are developed. Based on this, we recognize the joint prob- ability distribution of the observed profile as the likelihood function and utilize a fast Fourier transform-based procedure to estimate the pulse phase. Computational complexity of the proposed estimator is analyzed as well. Experimental results show that the proposed estimator significantly outperforms the currently used cross-correlation （CC） and nonlinear least squares （NLS） estima- tors, while significantly reduces the computational complexity compared with NLS and maxinmm likelihood （ML） estimators.