Design Of X-ray Pulsar Navigation Simulation System Hardware

Pulsar is a kind of neutron star with steady rotation period, Its most important property is the precise period of the signal it radiates, which leads to pulsar’s great application prospect in the field of timing and navigation etc. So X-ray Pulsar-based Navigation has improved a new technology of autonomous celestial navigation.This paper has realized an experiment system which is used to simulation X-ray Pulsar-based Navigation.This system consists of pulsar signal simulator and pulsar signal receiver. This system used Universal Serial Bus to transfer data, which greatly improved the data transmission rate and flexibility of the whole system. At the same time, this system adopted AD and DA hardware circuit to realize analog-digital convert and digital to analog convert. At last, the system adopted hardware circuit method based on FPGA to realize controlling and algorithmic design, which performed better in real-time, flexibility and low cost than the system using microprocessor as developer platform. Simulation and test indicated that the experiment system could satisfy a variety of navigation algorithms and had very good flexibility.