Related papers: A Potential Aid in the Target Selection for the Co…
All the fields of the extended space mission Kepler/K2 are located within the ecliptic. Many solar system objects thus cross the K2 stellar masks on a regular basis. We aim at providing to the entire community a simple tool to search and…
In this paper, we review some of the extant literature on the study of interstellar objects (ISOs). With the forthcoming Vera C. Rubin Telescope and Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), we find that $0.38 - 84$ `Oumuamua-like…
We simulate the passage through the Sun-Jupiter system of interstellar objects (ISOs) similar to 1I/`Oumuamua or 2I/Borisov. Capture of such objects is rare and overwhelmingly from low incoming speeds onto orbits akin to those of known…
This paper proposes a probabilistic framework for the sequential estimation of the likelihood of a driver or passenger(s) returning to the vehicle and time of arrival, from the available partial track of the user location. The latter can be…
We review the history of spacecraft encounters with comets, concentrating on those that took place in the recent past, since the publication of the Comets II book. This includes the flyby missions Stardust and Deep Impact, and their…
The preliminary mission design of spacecraft missions to asteroids often involves, in the early phases, the selection of candidate target asteroids. The final result of such an analysis is a list of asteroids, ranked with respect to the…
Context. Due to our increasing knowledge on the Galactic and stellar neighborhood of the Solar System, modern long-period comet motion studies have to take into account both stellar perturbations and the overall Galactic potential. Aims.…
Motivated by recent visits from interstellar comets, along with continuing discoveries of minor bodies in orbit of the Sun, this paper studies the capture of objects on initially hyperbolic orbits by our solar system. Using an ensemble of…
We consider the problem of tracking an unknown small target from aerial videos of medium to high altitudes. This is a challenging problem, which is even more pronounced in unavoidable scenarios of drastic camera motion and high density. To…
The interception of moving targets is a widely studied issue. In this paper, we propose an algorithm of intercepting the moving target with a wheeled mobile robot in a dynamic environment. We first predict the future position of the target…
Cometary impacts pose a long-term hazard to life on Earth. Impact mitigation techniques have been studied extensively, but they tend to focus on asteroid diversion. Typical asteroid interdiction schemes involve spacecraft physically…
Preliminary spacecraft trajectories for 45 Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) and Pluto suitable for launch between 2025 and 2040 are presented. These 46 objects comprise all objects with H magnitude < 4.0 or which have received a name from the…
Accurate long-horizon vessel trajectory prediction remains challenging due to compounded uncertainty from complex navigation behaviors and environmental factors. Existing methods often struggle to maintain global directional consistency,…
This paper proposes a two-phase framework to solve an optimal multi-target Lambert rendezvous problem. The first phase solves a series of single-target rendezvous problems for all departure-arrival object pairs to generate the elementary…
We develop a probabilistic framework for \emph{rendezvous planning}: given sparse, noisy observations of a fast-moving target, plan rendezvous spatiotemporal coordinates for a set of significantly slower seeking agents. The unknown target…
Object Goal Navigation requires a robot to find and navigate to an instance of a target object class in a previously unseen environment. Our framework incrementally builds a semantic map of the environment over time, and then repeatedly…
Motion planning involves decision making among combinatorial maneuver variants in urban driving. A planner must consider uncertainties and associated risks of the maneuver variants, and subsequently select a maneuver alternative. In this…
A coming resurgence of super heavy-lift launch vehicles has precipitated an immense interest in the future of crewed spaceflight and even future colonisation efforts. While it is true that a bright future awaits this sector, driven by…
Robotic catching of flying objects typically generates high impact forces that might lead to task failure and potential hardware damages. This is accentuated when the object mass to robot payload ratio increases, given the strong inertial…
Multicopter drones are becoming a key platform in several application domains, enabling precise on-the-spot sensing and/or actuation. We focus on the case where the drone must process the sensor data in order to decide, depending on the…