Student Projects for Space Navigation and Guidance

"Space Navigation and Guidance," taught every fall at the University of Maryland, is required of all space track undergraduate aerospace engineering majors. Every student is required to participate in a group project where real observations are used in the solution of a navigation problem with estimation from observations. In this paper, I discuss two such projects, an observatory project in which the students use a telescope to track a satellite and determine its orbit, and a GPS project in which they analyze GPS receiver data to determine the receiver's position.