Related papers: Asteroid Mining: ACT&Friends' Results for the GTOC…
This paper introduces Elastic Decision Transformer (EDT), a significant advancement over the existing Decision Transformer (DT) and its variants. Although DT purports to generate an optimal trajectory, empirical evidence suggests it…
Astrometric measurements are significantly challenged by the relative motion between the point source and the telescope, primarily due to the difficulty in accurately determining the position of the point source at the mid-exposure moment.…
We consider the problem of controlling in minimum time a two-level quantum system which can be subject to a drift. The control is assumed to be bounded in magnitude, and to affect two or three independent generators of the dynamics. We…
The asteroidal main belt is crossed by a web of mean-motion and secular resonances, that occur when there is a commensurability between fundamental frequencies of the asteroids and planets. Traditionally, these objects were identified by…
The bulk density of an asteroid informs us about its interior structure and composition. To constrain the bulk density one needs an estimate for the mass of the asteroid. The mass is estimated by analyzing an asteroid's gravitational…
Engine failure is a recurring emergency in General Aviation and fixed-wing UAVs, often requiring the pilot or remote operator to carry out carefully planned glides to safely reach a candidate landing strip. We tackle the problem of…
In this work, we explore how to classify asteroids in co-orbital motion with a given planet using Machine Learning. We consider four different kinds of motion in mean motion resonance with the planet, nominally Tadpole, Horseshoe and…
The intra-night trajectories of asteroids can be approximated by straight lines, and so are their intra-night detections. Therefore, the Hough transform, a line detecting algorithm, can be used to connect the line-up detections to find…
Finding the optimal ordering of k-subsets with respect to an objective function is known to be an extremely challenging problem. In this paper we introduce a new objective for this task, rooted in the problem of star identification on…
(Abridged) Out-of-the-ecliptic trajectories that are beneficial to space observatories such as the Terrestrial Planet Finder and other potential mid-IR missions are introduced. These novel trajectories result in significantly reduced…
The Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) proposes to retrieve a near-Earth asteroid and position it in a lunar distant retrograde orbit (DRO) for later study, crewed exploration, and ultimately resource exploitation. During the Caltech Space…
Open-pit mine scheduling is a complex real world optimization problem that involves uncertain economic values and dynamically changing resource capacities. Evolutionary algorithms are particularly effective in these scenarios, as they can…
In this paper we study the well-known greedy coordinate descent (GCD) algorithm to solve $\ell_1$-regularized problems and improve GCD by the two popular strategies: Nesterov's acceleration and stochastic optimization. Firstly, we propose a…
Equipping a spacecraft with multiple solar-powered electric engines (of the same or different types) compounds the task of optimal trajectory design due to presence of both real-valued inputs (power input to each engine in addition to the…
Achieving better exploitation and exploration capabilities (EEC) have always been an important yet challenging issue in the design of evolutionary optimization algorithm (EOA). The difficulties lie in obtaining a good balance in EEC, which…
Potentially impacting asteroids were analysed for their impact risk on the Earth. To this end, the Asteroid Risk Mitigation Optimization and Research (ARMOR) tool is currently being developed. The tool's modules are described and their…
In the past two decades an increasing interest in discovering Near Earth Objects has been noted in the astronomical community. Dedicated surveys have been operated for data acquisition and processing, resulting in the present discovery of…
In the racetrack acceleration model, proposed by Martin Gardner in 1973, each step consists of changing the position of the vehicle by a vector in $\mathbb{Z}^2$, with the constraints that two consecutive vectors differ by at most one unit…
This thesis focuses on the detection of extrasolar planets via the transit method, and more specifically addresses issues relevant to the preparation of upcoming space missions such as CoRoT, Kepler, Eddington, aiming to detect terrestrial…
Exploration requires that robots reason about numerous ways to cover a space in response to dynamically changing conditions. However, in continuous domains there are potentially infinitely many options for robots to explore which can prove…