This manuscript aims to present and evaluate the applicability of combining optical line-of-sight (LoS) navigation with crosslink radiometric navigation for deep-space cruising distributed space systems. To do so, a set of four distributed space systems architectures is presented, and for each of those, the applicability of the combination is evaluated, comparing it to the baseline solutions, which are based on only optical navigation. The comparison is done by studying the performance in a circular heliocentric orbit in seven different time intervals (ranging from 2024 to 2032) and exploiting the observation of all the pairs of planets from Mercury to Saturn. The distance between spacecraft is kept around 200 km. Later, a NEA mission test case is generated in order to explore the applicability to a more realistic case. This analysis shows that the technique can also cope with a variable inter-satellite distance, and the best performance is obtained when the spacecraft get closer to each other.

Observing the universe in the Ultra-Long Wavelength (ULW) regime has been called the ‘last frontier in astronomy’—real imaging capabilities here are yet to be achieved. Obtaining an image of the sky in this frequency band can be done by employing a swarm of satellites that together act as an interferometer and collect the required imaging information pieces throughout the course of their operational life. Meeting the mission objective is challenging for such a swarm, since this imposes restrictions on the operational environment and the relative position and velocity vectors between the swarm elements. This work proposes an orbit solution in a Heliocentric Earth-Leading Orbit (HELO) for an autonomous CubeSat swarm with chemical thrusters. A distributed formation flying algorithm is used to aid the collection of the required imaging information pieces. Furthermore, the estimated total mission launch mass is reduced by optimising cost functions and finding favourable position and velocity at start of operational life, as well as by finding favourable thrust manoeuvre patterns. The results show that the mission objective—obtaining a 3D map of the Universe in ULW—can be achieved with 68 6U spacecraft (S/C). Moreover, the swarm can remain in a Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) quiet zone of >5 × 10⁶ km, whilst not drifting further than ~ 6.6 × 10⁶ km from Earth for an operational life of one year.

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 target asteroid dataset. An overview of the current available technologies for each subsystem is presented, followed by a component selection driven by the mission constraints. First a typical asteroid fly-by mission is introduced together with the system and performance requirements. Then each characterizing subsystem is critically analyzed, and the proposed configuration is presented, showing the mission feasibility within only 3.9 kg of wet mass and 385 m/s of total ∆V.