Autonomous Navigation for Binary Asteroid Landing
P.A. Elffers (Airbus Defence and Space)
Edoardo Caroselli (AirBus Defence and Space GmbH)
Erik Jan Kampen (TU Delft - Control & Simulation)
E. Mooij (TU Delft - Astrodynamics & Space Missions)
More Info
expand_more
Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.
Abstract
This paper investigates the performance of an autonomous navigation system to navigate a spacecraft in the proximity of a binary asteroid system using optical and laser ranging measurements. The knowledge about the binary asteroid is limited to its orbital parameters and ellipsoid shape models. The accelerometer bias random walk is included in the estimation process. Over a four-hour landing maneuver starting from 6770 m altitude and ending at 550 m, the mean position estimation uncertainty is 41.6 m (3). It is shown that the navigation accuracy is sensitive to the Sun phase angle, the irregularity of the asteroid shape, and the goodness of fit of the ellipsoid shape model. The paper demonstrates that the navigation system is robust to large errors in the initialization of the extended Kalman filter state. The impact of image distortion and two types of image noise on the navigation performance are investigated.