Safe swarming around irregular gravity fields

Background

Hera mission: cubesat Milani and Juventas concurrent characterization of Didymos gravity

In the world’s first test of asteroid deflection, the European Space Agency's HERA mission will perform a detailed post-impact survey of the target asteroid, Dimorphos – the orbiting Moonlet in a binary asteroid system known as Didymos. After NASA’s DART mission has impacted the moonlet, Hera will turn the grand-scale experiment into a well-understood and repeatable planetary defence technique. Demonstrating new technologies from autonomous navigation around an asteroid to low gravity proximity operations, Hera will be humankind’s first probe to rendezvous with a binary asteroid system and Europe’s flagship Planetary Defender.

Two cubesats, called Milani and Juventas, will detach from the main mother satellite to perform a detailed exploration of the system, including the exploration of its gravity field. The use of cubesats to increase mission scientific outputs, while minimizing risks connected to operating in a highly unknown environment, is being considered as an increasingly attractive option in advanced missions scenarios [1-2].

Project goals

A swarm of 50 cubesats around Itokawa. Swarm positions (red) and collision avoidance manouvres (black) are reported over the course of a four day simulation.

In this project we take a further step into the future and study the establishment of a collision free cubesat swarm around several irregular bodies. In particular, we are interestied in studying the tradeoff between the propellant consumption, its distribution through the entire swarm, and the quality of the resulting characterization of the body gravitational field and shape [3]. Clearly one would want to fly very close to the asteroid surface in order to help the characterization of the asteroid properties (gravitational field, surface composition, etc...), but also not be forced to use much propellant to maintain such a proximity. Collision avoidance manouvres to avoid inter cubesat collisions as well as collisions to the asteroid surface will be more frequent with the swarm proximity to the surface.

For the first time we thus aim at establishing quantitative tradeoffs for this type of mission where tens of cubesats are perfroming a concurrent characterization of physical properties of the central body.

References

[1] Liu, Sining, Panagiotis Ioannis Theoharis, Raad Raad, Faisel Tubbal, Angelos Theoharis, Saeid Iranmanesh, Suhila Abulgasem, Muhammad Usman Ali Khan, and Ladislau Matekovits. "A survey on CubeSat missions and their antenna designs." Electronics 11, no. 13 (2022): 2021.

[2] Stacey, N., Dennison, K., & D'Amico, S. (2022, March). Autonomous Asteroid Characterization through Nanosatellite Swarming. In 2022 IEEE Aerospace Conference (AERO) (pp. 1-21). IEEE. Chicago

[3] Izzo, Dario, and Pablo Gómez. "Geodesy of irregular small bodies via neural density fields." Communications Engineering 1.1 (2022): 48.

[4] Goldberg, Hannah R., Özgür Karatekin, Birgit Ritter, Alain Herique, Paolo Tortora, Claudiu Prioroc, Borja Garcia Gutierrez, Paolo Martino, and Ian Carnelli. "The juventas cubesat in support of ESA's hera mission to the asteroid didymos." (2019).

Outcome

Mission Analysis Conference paper

Trajectory Optimisation of a Swarm Orbiting 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko Maximising Gravitational Signal

Marak, Rasmus and Blazquez, Emmanuel and Gomez, Pablo

9th International Conference on Astrodynamics Tools and Techniques (ICATT)

(2023)

Download

BibTex

Mission Analysis Conference paper

Small Celestial Body Exploration with CubeSat Swarms

Blazquez, Emmanuel and Izzo, Dario and Biscani, Francesco and Walker, Roger and Perez-Lissi, Franco

27th AIDAA International Congress