DustCube, a nanosatellite mission to binary asteroid 65803 Didymos as part of the ESA AIM mission

Perez, Franco; Modenini, Dario; Vazquez, A.d. del; Aguado, Fernando; Tubío, Ricardo; Dolgos, Gergely; Tortora, Paolo; González, Alberto; Manghi, Riccardo Lasagni; Zannoni, Marco; Nazeeruddin, Adeeb; Melozzi, Mauro; Carnelli, Ian

doi:10.1016/j.asr.2018.06.019

“…Later on, the mission has changed into the HERA mission. The five CubeSats ASPECT [32], DustCube [33], CUBATA [34], PALS [35] and AGEX [36], mission concepts were selected among several tens of competing concepts for further studies. Thereafter, out of the final selection, only two missions, Juventas and MILANI, have been selected for implementations [37].…”

Section: Past Present and Future Of Deep Space Small Satellite Missionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Autonomous navigation for deep space small satellites: Scientific and technological advances

Turan

¹

,

Speretta

²

,

Gill

³

2022

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In recent years, there is a growing interest in small satellites for deep space exploration. The current approach for planetary navigation is based on ground-based radiometric tracking. A new era of low-cost small satellites for space exploration will require autonomous deep space navigation. This will decrease the reliance on groundbased tracking and provide a substantial reduction in operational costs because of crowded communication networks. In addition, it will be an enabler for future missions currently impossible. This review investigates available deep space navigation methods from an autonomy perspective, considering trends in proposed deep space small satellite missions. Autonomous crosslink radiometric navigation, which is one of the best methods for small satellites due to its simplicity and the use of existing technologies, is studied, including available measurement methods, enabling technologies, and applicability to the currently proposed missions. The main objective of this study is to fill the gap in the scientific literature on the autonomous deep space navigation methods, deeply for crosslink radiometric navigation and to aim at showing the potential advantages that this technique could offer to the missions being analyzed. In this study, a total of 64 proposed deep space small satellite missions have been analyzed found from a variety of sources including journal papers, conference proceedings, and mission websites. In those missions, the most popular destinations are found to be cislunar space and small bodies with the purpose of surface mapping and characterization. Even though various autonomous navigation methods have been proposed for those missions, most of them have planned to use the traditional ground-based radiometric tracking for navigation purposes. This study also shows that more than half of the missions can benefit from the crosslink radiometric navigation through the inter-satellite link.

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“…ESA's Hera mission (Michel et al, 2018), the European component of the Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment (AIDA) international collaboration (Cheng et al, 2015), plans on deploying two CubeSats in the proximity of binary system 65803 Didymos, after arrival in 2027. The idea is supported by several SmallSat/CubeSat studies that have been performed in the past few years with reference to Hera (formerly known as AIM), to study the feasibility of deploying a small lander Lavagna, 2018, 2016;Lange et al, 2018;C ¸elik et al, 2019) and possibly CubeSats (Kohout et al, 2018;Lasagni Manghi et al, 2018;Perez et al, 2018) in the close proximity of Didymos. These were anticipated by detailed studies of the dynamical environment near binary asteroid systems (Tardivel and Scheeres, 2013;Tardivel, 2016;Ferrari et al, , 2014C ¸elik and Sánchez, 2017), some with direct application to the Didymos case study (Dell'Elce et al, 2017;Capannolo et al, 2019Capannolo et al, , 2016.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preliminary mission profile of Hera's Milani CubeSat

Ferrari,

Franzese,

Pugliatti

et al. 2021

Preprint

0

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CubeSats offer a flexible and low-cost option to increase the scientific and technological return of small-body exploration missions. ESA's Hera mission, the European component of the Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment (AIDA) international collaboration, plans on deploying two CubeSats in the proximity of binary system 65803 Didymos, after arrival in 2027. In this work, we discuss the feasibility and preliminary mission profile of Hera's Milani CubeSat. The Cube-Sat mission is designed to achieve both scientific and technological objectives.We identify the design challenges and discuss design criteria to find suitable solutions in terms of mission analysis, operational trajectories, and Guidance, Navigation, & Control (GNC) design. We present initial trajectories and GNC baseline, as a result of trade-off analyses. We assess the feasibility of the Milani CubeSat mission and provide a preliminary solution to cover the operational mission profile of Milani in the close-proximity of Didymos system.

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“…ESA's Hera mission (Michel et al, 2018), the European component of the Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment (AIDA) international collaboration (Cheng et al, 2015), plans on deploying two CubeSats in the proximity of binary system 65803 Didymos, after arrival in 2027. The idea is supported by several SmallSat/CubeSat studies that have been performed in the past few years with reference to Hera (formerly known as AIM), to study the feasibility of deploying a small lander Lavagna, 2018, 2016;Lange et al, 2018;C ¸elik et al, 2019) and possibly CubeSats (Kohout et al, 2018;Lasagni Manghi et al, 2018;Perez et al, 2018) in the close proximity of Didymos. These were anticipated by detailed studies of the dynamical environment near binary asteroid systems (Tardivel and Scheeres, 2013;Tardivel, 2016;Ferrari et al, , 2014C ¸elik and Sánchez, 2017), some with direct application to the Didymos case study (Dell'Elce et al, 2017;Capannolo et al, 2019Capannolo et al, , 2016.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%