Identification of near-Earth asteroids using multi-spacecraft systems

For several decades, humanity has worked on cataloguing the population of near-Earth asteroids (NEA's). Knowledge of these small members of the Solar system not only helps in defending Earth from asteroid impacts; study of the population might also provide valuable scientific insights, and open economic possibilities through developments such as...

Enhanced Distributed Space Systems with Miniature Spacecraft: Spatial Distribution, Collision Analysis and Cooperative Communication

The repertoire of words in the English language to refer to groups of animals is quite fascinating to say the least – a congregation of alligators, an army of ants, a troop of baboons, a pride of lions, a train of camels, a destruction of cats, an intrusion of cockroaches, a mob of emus, a plague of insects, a drift of pigs, and so on. The...

Long-term passive distance-bounded relative motion in the presence of TeX perturbations

This paper presents closed-form solutions for the problem of long-term satellite relative motion in the presence of J2 perturbations, and introduces a design methodology for long-term passive distance-bounded relative motion. There are two key ingredients of closed-form solutions.One is the model of relative motion; the other is the Hamiltonian...

Collision analysis and mitigation for distributed space systems

Collision analysis and mitigation performed for the QB50 mission. The aim of this thesis report is to identify which mitigation strategies are most suitable for a network of uncontrollable satellites. Furthermore, the aim is to set-out a method to determine the collision probability for a network of uncontrollable satellites, and identify the...

Uncertainty multidisciplinary design optimization of distributed space systems

The design of Distributed Space Systems (DSSs) is a challenging task, especially in the conceptual design stage where unknown or uncertain information extensively exist. This paper investigates the problem of designing DSSs in the presence of uncertainties. The uncertainties associated with DSSs are discussed. It is shown that DSSs are...