Modeling and Simulation of Plate-Model Errors in Stellar-Aberration Based Autonomous Navigation

Autonomous navigation based on the stellar aberration effect derives the spacecraft’s velocity vector from the apparent stellar displacements. While promising, this technique is highly sensitive to distortions in the optical sensors onboard, requiring milliarcsecond-level correction. The plate-model method provides classical distortion correction, but formal uncertainties of plate constants depend on the number and spatial distribution of reference stars, catalog position errors, and sensor measurement noise. These uncertainties propagate through the plate model to the corrected positions of target stars, ultimately limiting the precision of the navigation observables. In this study, we systematically investigate the error-propagation mechanism of the plate model in the context of stellar-aberration navigation. We construct an all-sky simulated navigation catalog based on Gaia Date Release 3 and then establish a complete mathematical error-propagation chain from reference-star covariances to plate-constant solutions and finally to target-star positions. Adopting the six-constant plate model, we perform Monte Carlo simulations over the entire sky to quantify the influence of reference-star number and distribution on target-star positional precision. The results show that when more than ∼10 reference stars are available and well distributed within a field, the propagated plate-model error remains below 1 milliarcsecond, reaching 0.2–0.4 mas under favorable conditions. These findings demonstrate that plate-model errors are not the dominant limitation for stellar-aberration based autonomous navigation, provided that sufficient reference stars are included in the solution.