Related papers: Autonomous Orbit Determination for a CubeSat Cruis…
Autonomous navigation is one of the main enabling technologies for future space missions. While conventional spacecraft are navigated through ground stations, their employment for deep-space CubeSats yields costs comparable to those of the…
This study presents an autonomous orbit determination system based on crosslink radiometric measurements applied to a future lunar CubeSat mission to clearly highlight its advantages with respect to existing ground-based navigation…
Optical navigation on a CubeSat must rely on the best extraction of the directions of some beacons from on-board images. We present an experiment on OPS-SAT, a CubeSat of the European Space Agency (ESA), that will characterize an onboard…
The surge of deep-space probes makes it unsustainable to navigate them with standard radiometric tracking. Self-driving interplanetary satellites represent a solution to this problem. In this work, a full vision-based navigation algorithm…
Spaceborne gravity gradients are proposed in this paper to provide autonomous orbit determination capabilities for near Earth satellites. The gravity gradients contain useful position information which can be extracted by matching the…
CubeSats and small satellites are emerging as low-cost tools for performing science and exploration in deep space. These new classes of satellite exploit the latest advancement in miniaturization of electronics, power systems, and…
The wide availability of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) electronics that can withstand Low Earth Orbit conditions has opened avenue for wide deployment of CubeSats and small-satellites. CubeSats thanks to their low developmental and launch…
Autonomous orbit determination via integration of epoch-differenced gravity gradients and starlight refraction is proposed in this paper for low-Earth-orbiting satellites operating in GPS-denied environments. The starlight refrac-tion can…
A new era of space exploration and exploitation is fast approaching. A multitude of spacecraft will flow in the future decades under the propulsive momentum of the new space economy. Yet, the flourishing proliferation of deep-space assets…
This paper presents a neural network-based Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) to estimate and track the pose (i.e., position and orientation) of a known, noncooperative, tumbling target spacecraft in a close-proximity rendezvous scenario. The…
The miniaturization of electronics, sensors and actuators has enabled the growing use of CubeSats and sub-20 kg spacecraft. Their reduced mass and volume has the potential to translate into significant reductions in required propellant and…
This study aims at advancing mathematical and computational techniques for reconstructing the interior structure of a near earth asteroid (NEA) via Computed Radar Tomography (CRT). We introduce a far-field model for full-wave CRT and…
Autonomous proximity operations, such as active debris removal and on-orbit servicing, require high-fidelity relative navigation solutions that remain robust in the presence of parametric uncertainty. Standard estimation frameworks…
A pose estimation technique based on error-state extended Kalman that fuses angular rates, accelerations, and relative range measurements is presented in this paper. An unconstrained dynamic model with kinematic coupling for a…
CubeSats have the potential to expand astrophysical discovery space, complementing ground-based electromagnetic and gravitational-wave observatories. The CubeSat design specifications help streamline delivery of instrument payloads to…
This paper presents a novel formulation and solution of orbit determination over finite time horizons as a learning problem. We present an approach to orbit determination under very broad conditions that are satisfied for n-body problems.…
The Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat (SPARCS) is a 6U CubeSat under development to monitor the flaring and chromospheric activity of M dwarfs at near-ultraviolet (NUV) and far-ultraviolet (FUV) wavelengths. The spacecraft hosts two…
This paper introduces two new algorithms to accurately estimate the process noise covariance of a discrete-time Kalman filter online for robust orbit determination in the presence of dynamics model uncertainties. Common orbit determination…
DESTINY+ is an upcoming JAXA Epsilon medium-class mission to flyby multiple asteroids including Phaethon. As an asteroid flyby observation instrument, a telescope mechanically capable of single-axis rotation, named TCAP, is mounted on the…
This paper presents a fault-tolerant 3D vision system for autonomous robotic operation. In particular, pose estimation of space objects is achieved using 3D vision data in an integrated Kalman filter (KF) and an Iterative Closest Point…