Staff at South Ural State University (SUSU), a partner of TV BRICS, have developed and patented a programme for the optimal placement of navigation pseudo-satellites on the ground. It helps aircraft determine their altitude more accurately during descent and landing. The development can be used in civil aviation and for the landing of future reusable launch vehicles. This was reported on the university’s website.
Pseudo-satellites are ground-based devices that act as additional sources of navigation signals for aircraft. They are particularly essential for aeroplanes during descent, when errors in altitude determination are most critical.
Researchers from the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at South Ural State University have proposed a solution that calculates the best locations for installing pseudo-satellites and the optimal tower heights to further improve navigation accuracy. The unique programme takes two key parameters into account: the terrain and the landing trajectory. All that is required is to input data on the elevations of the area within a 25-kilometre radius and a typical aircraft descent trajectory.
“Our programme automatically assigns weighting coefficients to different sections of the trajectory, giving the greatest attention to the most critical stages – the descent from an altitude of 300 metres to the ground. As a result, the coefficient of the vertical component of the geometric factor decreases from 2.5 to 0.6. On average, this increases the accuracy of determining the aircraft’s altitude prior to landing by more than four times,” explained Stanislav Lysov, senior lecturer at the Department of Electronic and Radio Engineering at South Ural State University.
According to the programme’s developers, it could be useful for civil aviation, particularly at remote and northern airfields, where signals from global navigation systems are often unstable. The programme can be used by surveyors to identify the most suitable sites for the construction of runways, as well as by companies involved in launching cargo into orbit using advanced reusable launch vehicles.