NavIC and GPS State Vector as Tracking Sources for Flight Safety

For any launch vehicle flown with a flight termination system, the primary requirement is to know the current state vector of the vehicle from at least two different sources of tracking system out of which at least one should be independent of the vehicle navigation system. Radars operating in C-band and S-band are being currently used as primary source for tracking ISRO's launch vehicles. The maintenance and upkeep of these radars are very expensive. Till now, NavIC and GPS data are used only to correct the Inertial Navigation system(INS) data in ISRO. But, when INS loses its reference, this correction is not possible. To increase the tracking sources, this paper proposes to use the position and velocity information from NAVIC and GPS receivers directly for flight safety decision making purposes. In future, these tracking sources can also be used in autonomous flight safety systems to improve source diversity.