Attitude & orbital control system design for near-Earth asteroid exploration using autonomous miniature satellites

The thesis explores designing an attitude and orbital control system for an autonomous 6U CubeSat near-Earth asteroid fly-by mission, aiming to conceptualize an off-the-shelf solution. It addresses selecting propulsion systems for interplanetary travel, reaction wheel desaturation, and attitude control during the mission.<br/><br/>Through a fuel...

Solar Sailing Trajectory Design to Multiple Co-Orbital Near-Earth Asteroids

This paper investigates the use of solar sailing propulsion to visit as many co-orbital near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) as possible, within a fixed time-frame. This research builds on previous publications, which have shown solar sailing to be a suitable propulsion method to visit NEAs. The dynamics of this problem are modelled within the Solar Sail...

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...

Identification of Near-Earth Asteroids Using Multi-Spacecraft Systems

Through numerous survey efforts over the past decades, humanity has achieved substantial knowledge of the near-Earth asteroid (NEA) population. Nevertheless, survey completeness at small asteroid sizes is still limited, and unannounced impacts, such as the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor, are common enough to warrant further identification efforts....

Quasi-periodic invariant tori and retrieval of Near-Earth Asteroids using low-energy trajectories

Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) have attracted the attention of the scientific community in the last few years. Not only because of their importance to life on Earth but also their scientific potential and possible economic returns. This work explores the use of quasi-periodic orbits to bound the motion of NEAs close to the Earth’s vicinity for...

Novel 3U stand-alone cubesat architecture for autonomous near earth asteroid fly-by

The purpose of this work is to present a novel CubeSat architecture, aimed to explore Near Earth Asteroids. The fast growth in small satellite commercial-off-the-shelf technologies, which characterized the last decade of space industry, is exploited to design a 3U CubeSat able to provide a basic scientific return sufficient to improve the...

Multi-Flyby Mission to a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid: Improving the Earth Impact Probability Knowledge

The feasibility of improving the Earth collision uncertainty knowledge of a potentially Earth impacting asteroid by means of a multi-flyby mission has been researched in this thesis. The feasibility is assessed both from an astrodynamics point of view and from a systems engineering point of view. The astrodynamics part provides knowledge...