Optical Navigation and Fuel-Efficient Orbit Control Around an Irregular-Shaped Asteroid

As space exploration missions become increasingly complex, there is a growing need for autonomous operation capabilities to support stringent mission requirements. For long-duration asteroid exploration missions, a key concern is how to reliably and efficiently keep the spacecraft around a target asteroid. Given the large distance from the Earth, ground commands for navigation and guidance cannot be issued in real time and are not a practical solution. Fuel-efficient feedback control can be used to stabilize an arbitrary orbit about an asteroid provided on-board estimates of the spacecraft’s position and velocity vectors with respect to the asteroid center of mass. This paper demonstrates fuel-efficient orbit control, and investigates methods to estimate these relative navigation state vectors using a combination of optical cameras and LIDAR technologies for an autonomous orbit control implementation.