An approximate model for pulsar navigation simulation

This paper presents an approximate model for the simulation of pulsar aided navigation systems. High fidelity simulations of these systems are computationally intensive and impractical for simulating periods of a day or more. Simulation of yearlong missions is done by abstracting navigation errors as periodic Gaussian noise injections. This paper presents an intermediary approximate model to simulate position errors for periods of several weeks, useful for building more accurate Gaussian error models. This is done by abstracting photon detection and binning, replacing it with a simple deterministic process. The approximate model enables faster computation of error injection models, allowing the error model to be inexpensively updated throughout a simulation. Testing of the approximate model revealed an optimistic performance prediction for non-millisecond pulsars with more accurate predictions for pulsars in the millisecond spectrum. This performance gap was attributed to noise which is not present in the approximate model but can be predicted and added to improve accuracy.