Autonomous Exploration of a Small Near-Earth Asteroid

What is it about?

In asteroid exploration, there is large uncertainty in the target's size, shape, mass, and location before arrival. The traditional approach to safely navigate a spacecraft in the vicinity of an asteroid involves intensive communications between the probe and ground stations, which could be costly. We propose an autonomous exploration scheme at small asteroids, where the spacecraft predicts the occurrence of predefined events and controls its trajectory to fulfill high-level mission goals without ground in the loop. The proposed approach leverages onboard optical and accelerometer measurements for the autonomous estimation of relative position, velocity, and various parameters such as asteroid's mass and size. Through high-fidelity numerical simulations, we demonstrate the robustness of the proposed strategy.

Featured Image