China gets closer to Jupiter mission by bringing Nasa’s StarNAV concept to life

Chinese researchers have tested a new way for spacecraft to navigate in deep space, putting a concept funded by Nasa into practice and paving the way for the country’s planned mission to Jupiter in 2030.

Known as stellar aberration navigation, the approach uses tiny shifts in the relative position of stars to work out how fast a probe is moving and in what direction, allowing autonomous real-time navigation without constantly relying on tracking and commands from Earth.

In a low-Earth-orbit experiment in January, the Tianhui-7 satellite used this method to determine its position to within about 5km (3.1 miles), a performance comparable to Nasa’s antenna-based Deep Space Network.

Jupiter can be up to 900 million km from Earth, with radio signals taking more than 50 minutes to travel one way. That made it impossible for ground controllers to intervene in real time, wrote researchers from the China Academy of Space Technology – the country’s main spacecraft manufacturer – in a paper that will be published in the Journal of Deep Space Exploration.