Related papers: The Feasibility of Potentially Hazardous Asteroids…
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…
We characterize mission profiles for human expeditions to near-Earth asteroids, Venus, and Mars. Near-Earth objects (NEOs) are the closest destinations beyond cis-lunar space and present a compelling target with capabilities already under…
This paper first defines a class of estimation problem called simultaneous navigation and characterization (SNAC), which is a superset of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). A SNAC framework is then developed for the Autonomous…
Optimization of low-thrust trajectories that involve a larger number of orbit revolutions is considered a challenging problem. This paper describes a high-precision symplectic method and optimization techniques to solve the minimum-energy…
We consider the problem of optimizing the trajectory of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). Assuming a traffic intensity map of users to be served, the UAV must travel from a given initial location to a final position within a given duration…
Accurate gravity field calculations are necessary for landing on planets, moons, asteroids, minimoons, or other irregularly shaped bodies, but current methods become increasingly inaccurate and slow near the surface. We present high…
A shortcoming of existing reachability approaches for nonlinear systems is the poor scalability with the number of continuous state variables. To mitigate this problem we present a simulation-based approach where we first sample a number of…
Navigating an arbitrary-shaped ground robot safely in cluttered environments remains a challenging problem. The existing trajectory planners that account for the robot's physical geometry severely suffer from the intractable runtime. To…
International and U.S. strategies and protocols have identified the need to develop rapid-response spacecraft reconnaissance capabilities as a priority to advance planetary defense readiness. A space-based reconnaissance response is…
This paper proposes a systematic method for generating practical and robust low-thrust spacecraft trajectories. One contribution is to consider the change in mass of the spacecraft at two levels: a) the propulsive acceleration and b) the…
An analytical formulation for collision avoidance maneuvers involving a spacecraft and a space debris is presented, including solutions for the maximum deviation and minimum collision probability cases. Gauss' planetary equations and…
This paper examines the effectiveness of an asteroid exploration architecture comprised of multiple nanosatellite sized spacecraft deployed from a single mother ship into a heliocentric orbit in the main asteroid belt where the mothership…
We propose the concept of a space mission to probe the so called flyby anomaly, an unexpected velocity change experienced by some deep-space probes using earth gravity assists. The key feature of this proposal is the use of GNSS systems to…
Modern astronomical surveys detect asteroids by linking together their appearances across multiple images taken over time. This approach faces limitations in detecting faint asteroids and handling the computational complexity of trajectory…
This paper presents a method to determine the reachable set (RS) of spacecraft after a single velocity impulse with an arbitrary direction, which is appropriate for the RS in both the state and observation spaces under arbitrary dynamics,…
Technology has advanced to the point that it is possible to image the entire sky every night and process the data in real time. The sky is hardly static: many interesting phenomena occur, including variable stationary objects such as stars…
In this paper, we present an innovative risk-bounded motion planning methodology for stochastic multi-agent systems. For this methodology, the disturbance, noise, and model uncertainty are considered; and a velocity obstacle method is…
Advanced solar sailing has been an increasingly attractive propulsion system for highly non-Keplerian orbits. Three new applications of the orbital angular momentum reversal (H-reversal) trajectories using solar sails are presented in this…
Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) are a special subset of Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) that can come close to the Earth and are large enough to cause significant damage in the event of an impact. Observations and researches of Earth-PHAs…
The vertical trajectory optimization for the en route descent phase is studied in the presence of both along track and cross winds, which are both modeled as functions of altitude. The flight range covers some portion of a cruise segment…