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Completed TRL 3 (started at 3, targeting 4)
NASA’s new Asteroid Redirect Mission would see a robotic spacecraft rendezvous, capture and steer a small asteroid to cislunar Space. Because of the complexity and novelty of the mission, success requires that first a testbed be developed so system behavior can be modeled and observed. This task will develop a testbed control system - to be used in conjunction with the Asteroid Retrieval Capture Mechanism Development task - that will provide a place to study data from a large number of possible mission execution scenarios, evaluate anomalies, and discover new operations principles that will reduce the risk associated with planning and executing an asteroid capture on the Asteroid Redirect Mission timeline.
This task will develop and test a telemetry and command system for JPL’s Asteroid Retrieval Testbed. The system will support multi-disciplinary investigation and provide the data capture, analysis and visualization tools to support collaborative assessment of system performance from large data sets, both captured and simulated. The team will demonstrate mission operations tools supporting tumbling asteroid capture and retrieval including: modeling spin and inertial state of the asteroid based on 3D sensing of the asteroid; estimation of angular momentum vector direction; and planning tools for estimating safe autonomous capture.
The testbed control system will provide a telemetry and command system for the Asteroid Retrieval Testbed, and will be used in conjunction with the Asteroid Retrieval Capture Mechanism Development task. This will provide the capability to study data from a large number of possible mission execution scenarios, evaluate anomalies, and discover new operations principles that will reduce the risk associated with planning and executing an asteroid capture on the Asteroid Redirect Mission timeline.
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