Autonomous Landing and Proximity Operation Technology for Poorly-Characterized Small Bodies

While we have an increasing number of small-body missions, it has been challenging to deploy a lander that lands on poorly- characterized small bodies, as can be seen in recent failed attempts in the Hayabusa, OSIRIS-REx, and Rosetta missions. Many previous small-body missions, namely OSIRIS-REx and Hayabusa, have utilized rehearsal procedures to minimize the chance of risk; however, these procedures still do not provide the ability to adaptively modify the trajectory in response to gravitational or other uncertainties. In response to this background, the objective of this proposal is to develop an autonomous trajectory adjustment technology with minimum active control for landing and proximity operation about unknown or poorly-characterized small bodies, so that the system has larger adaptability against uncertainties with little reliance on rehearsals. We consider a mothership-daughtership configuration, where the former stays in orbit while the latter land on the small body, and will investigate the theory and methods for the control configuration and algorithms to control the daughtership lander solely from the image from the mothership that deployed it. To determine minimum control, the amount of control necessary to overcome the gravitational uncertainty perturbations will be adaptively optimized based on the error in landing location for the uncontrolled case. The technology proposed as part of this research falls under Technology Area 9.2.8.8: Small Body Proximity Operations. The current TRL of the proposed technology is 2, and this effort aims to raise it to 3.

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