Related papers: Powered Descent Trajectory Optimization of Chandra…
This paper presents the real-time retargeting guidance policy developed for the Chandrayaan-3 lunar landing mission. The baseline guidance generates approximate fuel-optimal descent trajectories, while a high-level policy enables safe…
Chandrayaan-3 mission achieved a historic milestone with its successful soft landing near the lunar south pole, highlighting the critical role of the navigation, guidance, and control (NGC) system. Navigation provided vehicle state…
This paper presents the preliminary design of the descent and landing trajectory of the ESA Argonaut lunar lander. The mission scenario and driving system constraints are presented and accounted for in the design of a fuel-optimal…
This paper presents a low-thrust trajectory optimization strategy to achieve a near-circular lunar orbit for a CubeSat injected into a lunar flyby trajectory. The 12U CubeSat HORYU-VI is equipped with four Hall-effect thrusters and designed…
In this paper, we consider a trajectory planning problem arising from a lunar vertical landing with minimum fuel consumption. The vertical landing requirement is written as a final steering angle constraint, and a nonnegative regularization…
This paper addresses an optimal guidance problem concerning the vertical landing of a lunar lander with the objective of minimizing fuel consumption. The vertical landing imposes a final attitude constraint, which is treated as a final…
In this work, we present Transformer-based Powered Descent Guidance (T-PDG), a scalable algorithm for reducing the computational complexity of the direct optimization formulation of the spacecraft powered descent guidance problem. T-PDG…
This article examines India's first science lander mission on 22 July 2019, attempting a historic landing on the Lunar South Pole Region. Communication was lost at 2.1 km above the lunar surface during the rough braking phase. The cause of…
We develop an integrated guidance and control system that in conjunction with a stabilized seeker and landing site detection software can achieve precise and safe planetary landing. The seeker tracks the designated landing site by adjusting…
Recent successful lunar landing missions have generated significant interest among space agencies in establishing a permanent human settlement on the Moon. Building a lunar base requires multiple and frequent landing missions to support…
We present an optimization-based approach for fuel-efficient spacecraft rendezvous to the Gateway, a space station that will be deployed on a near rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) around the Moon. The approach: i) ensures passive safety and…
A control optimization approach is presented for a chaser spacecraft tasked with maintaining proximity to a target space object while avoiding collisions. The target object trajectory is provided numerically to account for both passive…
This paper presents a framework for controlled emergency landing of a quadcopter, experiencing a rotor failure, away from sensitive areas. A complete mathematical model capturing the dynamics of the system is presented that takes the…
Spacecraft operations are influenced by uncertainties such as dynamics modeling, navigation, and maneuver execution errors. Although mission design has traditionally incorporated heuristic safety margins to mitigate the effect of…
DESTINY+ is a planned JAXA medium-class Epsilon mission from Earth to deep space using a low-thrust, many-revolution orbit. Such a trajectory design is a challenging problem not only for trajectory design but also for flight operations, and…
This paper presents a Neural Networks (NNs) based approach for designing the Fuel-Optimal Powered Descent Guidance (FOPDG) for lunar pinpoint landing. According to Pontryagin's Minimum Principle, the optimality conditions are first derived.…
A robust drift-safe rendezvous trajectory optimization tool is developed in this work, with applications to orbital rendezvous and proximity operations. The method is based on direct collocation and utilizes a sequential convex programming…
In this paper, we investigate joint 3-dimensional (3D) trajectory planning and resource allocation for rotary-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensing. To support emerging real-time SAR applications and…
We present Planning as Descent (PaD), a framework for offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning that grounds trajectory synthesis in verification. Instead of learning a policy or explicit planner, PaD learns a goal-conditioned energy…
Low-thrust trajectory design relies heavily on repeated evaluations of fuel consumption and transfer feasibility, which require expensive optimal control solutions. In this work, we show these quantities can be accurately approximated by…