Abstract
Future missions to small bodies demand higher level of autonomy in the Guidance, Navigation and Control system for higher scientific return and lower operational costs. Different navigation strategies have been assessed for ESA’s asteroid impact mission (AIM). The main objective of AIM is the detailed characterization of binary asteroid Didymos. The trajectories for the proximity operations shall be intrinsically safe, i.e., no collision in presence of failures (e.g., spacecraft entering safe mode), perturbations (e.g., non-spherical gravity field), and errors (e.g., maneuver execution error). Hyperbolic arcs with sufficient hyperbolic excess velocity are designed to fulfil the safety, scientific, and operational requirements. The trajectory relative to the asteroid is determined using visual camera images. The ground-based trajectory prediction error at some points is comparable to the camera Field Of View (FOV). Therefore, some images do not contain the entire asteroid. Autonomous navigation can update the state of the spacecraft relative to the asteroid at higher frequency. The objective of the autonomous navigation is to improve the on-board knowledge compared to the ground prediction. The algorithms shall fit in off-the-shelf, space-qualified avionics. This note presents suitable image processing and relative-state filter algorithms for autonomous navigation in proximity operations around binary asteroids.
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Abbreviations
- t :
-
Time (s)
- \({\mathbf{x}}\) :
-
Augmented state vector
- \({\mathbf{r}}\) :
-
Spacecraft position vector (m)
- r :
-
Spacecraft position norm (scalar) (m)
- \({\mathbf{v}}\) :
-
Spacecraft velocity vector (m/s)
- v :
-
Spacecraft velocity norm (scalar) (m/s)
- \({\mathbf{a}}_{\text{CTRL}}\) :
-
Thruster acceleration vector (m/s2)
- \({\mathbf{r}}_{S}\) :
-
Secondary asteroid position vector (m)
- C :
-
Margin on pericenter velocity (−)
- m :
-
Spacecraft mass (kg)
- µ :
-
Gravity parameter of the asteroid system (m3/s2)
- µ P :
-
Gravity parameter of the primary asteroid (m3/s2)
- µ S :
-
Gravity parameter of the secondary asteroid (m3/s2)
- \({\varvec{\upvarepsilon}}_{\text{COB}}\) :
-
Position of the COB wrt the COM in the detector plane (pixel)
- \(p_{\text{COB}}\) :
-
Expected position of the COM in the detector plane (pixel)
- L :
-
Unit vector direction to the asteroid COM in the detector frame (−)
- \({\mathbf{u}}_{\det }\) :
-
Direction of the Sun in the detector plane (−)
- φ :
-
Sun phase angle (rad)
- R :
-
Asteroid mean radius (m)
- h :
-
Pixel angular size (rad)
- \({\mathbf{A}}\) :
-
Rotation matrix from inertial frame to detector frame (−)
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Gil-Fernandez, J., Ortega-Hernando, G. Autonomous vision-based navigation for proximity operations around binary asteroids. CEAS Space J 10, 287–294 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12567-018-0197-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12567-018-0197-5