Purpura, Giovanni (Politecnico di Milano), Di Lizia, Pierluigi (Politecnico di Milano)

An Autonomous GNC Strategy for Asteroid Impactor Missions

Scheduled for presentation during the Regular Session "Debris and asteroids" (FrM12), Friday, April 5, 2019, 09:30−10:00, BL281.1

5th CEAS Conference on Guidance, Navigation and Control, April 3-5, 2019, Milano, Italy

This information is tentative and subject to change. Compiled on April 23, 2024

Abstract

The Solar System features thousands of Near-Earth Asteroids that could be at collision risk with our planet in the future. Scientists are investigating the possibility of deflecting asteroids from their trajectory by means of a hyper-velocity impactor spacecraft. The aim of this research is to develop and simulate a GNC strategy to control the spacecraft towards the asteroid. The navigation is based on the use of a camera to estimate the relative position through image analysis and a filtering process. A zero-effort error strategy is adopted for the control. A simulator has been developed to render the simulated images online and test the GNC algorithms. The simulator is used to assess the performance of the strategy on different scenarios and perform a sensitivity analysis.