The Analysis of Thermal Noise Effects on Signal Correlation for Spacecrafts Interferometric Tracking

This article has made a study of the thermal noise effects on spacecrafts signal correlation in details. Analysis has been made based on statistical signal processing, and the difference between Cross-Correlation method and Independent-Correlation method has been figured out. Simulation has been made to evaluate the phase estimation performance between two methods. Both theoretical and simulation results show that Independent-Correlation method could achieve better performance than Cross-Correlation method in the sense of phase estimation variance. And the performance of the Cross-Correlation degrades severely when the power signal-to-noise ratio is poor which is the case in deep space navigation.