Related papers: Threat Mitigation: The Asteroid Tugboat
Recent major oil-spills were tracked using observations with sufficient altitudes over the sea surface, to detect oil slick locations. For oil-spill responders, we propose a captive Unmanned Aerial System, UAS acting like a periscope over a…
NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission will impact its target asteroid, Dimorphos, at an oblique angle that will not be known prior to the impact. We computed iSALE-3D simulations of DART-like impacts on asteroid surfaces at…
This paper presents the development and evaluation of an optimization-based autonomous trajectory planning algorithm for the asteroid reconnaissance phase of a deep-space exploration mission. The reconnaissance phase is a low-altitude flyby…
Balloon-borne astronomy offers an attractive option for experiments that require precise pointing and attitude stabilization, due to a large reduction in the atmospheric interference observed by ground-based systems as well as the low-cost…
The earth's orbit is becoming increasingly crowded with debris that poses significant safety risks to the operation of existing and new spacecraft and satellites. The active tether-net system, which consists of a flexible net with…
Hazardous asteroid has been one of the concerns for humankind as fallen asteroid on earth could cost a huge impact on the society.Monitoring these objects could help predict future impact events, but such efforts are hindered by the large…
Context: The measurement of the Yarkovsky effect on near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) is common practice in orbit determination today, and the number of detections will increase with the developments of new and more accurate telescopic surveys.…
As autonomous robots increasingly become part of daily life, they will often encounter dynamic environments while only having limited information about their surroundings. Unfortunately, due to the possible presence of malicious dynamic…
In this paper we present a mission architecture and a robotic platform, the Shapeshifter, that allow multi-domain and redundant mobility on Saturn's moon Titan, and potentially other bodies with atmospheres. The Shapeshifter is a collection…
Asteroid mining offers the possibility to revolutionize supply of resources vital for human civilization. Preliminary analysis suggests that Near-Earth Asteroids (NEA) contain enough volatile and high value minerals to make the mining…
Asteroid (99942) Apophis' close approach in 2029 will be one of the most significant small-body encounter events in the near future and offers a good opportunity for in situ exploration to determine the asteroid's surface properties and…
Context. Tangential YORP is a thermophysical effect that can alter the rotation rate of asteroids and is distinct from the "normal" YORP effect, but to date has only been studied for asteroids with zero obliquity. Aims. The tangential YORP…
Low-thrust trajectories play a crucial role in optimizing scientific output and cost efficiency in asteroid belt missions. Unlike high-thrust transfers, low-thrust trajectories require solving complex optimal control problems. This…
Near-Earth small-body mission targets 162173 Ryugu, 101955 Bennu, and 25143 Itokawa produce gravity fields around 4 orders of magnitude below that of Earth and their irregular shapes, combined with rotational effects produce varying surface…
The focus of this work is the current distribution of asteroids in co-orbital motion with Venus, Earth and Jupiter, under a quasi-coplanar configuration and for a medium-term timescale of the order of 900 years. A co-orbital trajectory is a…
As the number of uncontrollable objects in low earth orbit is rising, the thread of collisions and thus the breakdown of working satellites becomes worth analyzing. Consequently, projects on removing objects from the important orbits are…
We propose NH-TTC, a general method for fast, anticipatory collision avoidance for autonomous robots having arbitrary equations of motions. Our proposed approach exploits implicit differentiation and subgradient descent to locally optimize…
In this paper, the trajectory planning problem for autonomous rendezvous and docking between a controlled spacecraft and a tumbling target is addressed. The use of a variable planning horizon is proposed in order to construct an appropriate…
We propose a low-cost robotic optical survey aimed at $1-300$ m Near Earth Objects (NEO) based on four state-of-the-art telescopes having extremely wide field of view. The small Near-Earth Asteroids (NEA) represent a potential risk but also…
Previous work by our group has shown the potential for an aerogravity assist at Triton using a trailing ballute to capture a probe into orbit about Neptune. The current work extends that study by using the LOFTID aeroshell configuration, a…