RIT 2021
RIT 2021 is a collaborative EU funded project with the objective to create sustainable growth in the region of Norrbotten and enhancing its role as Sweden’s leading space region. The partners belong to the academic sector, the business sector and actors within the innovation support system.
The project is a collaborative initiative with OHB Sweden, aims to establish an autonomous visual navigation framework around small celestial objects. Exploring small celestial objects like asteroids and comets is recently emerging as a challenging trend. In search of the history of solar system evolution and trace of life, the scientific interest of celestial sample-return from Near-Earth Object and a global attentiveness growing towards the rising demand for planetary protection drives high demand for asteroid exploration and in-situ missions. To achieve such a diverse class of ambitious objectives, precise autonomous space navigation has critical importance. The project investigates upon a framework to establish a robust navigation architecture, that will enable precise onboard autonomous visual navigation around small celestial body. The project will be to investigate upon novel multi-sensor fusion architecture that combines this sensor measurement using model-based filtering approach to estimate the pose of the spacecraft.
Exploring small celestial objects like asteroids and comets is recently emerging as a challenging trend amongst the space agencies across the globe. In search of the history of solar system evolution and trace of life, the scientific interest of celestial sample-return from Near-Earth Object and a global attentiveness growing towards the rising demand for planetary
protection drives high demand for asteroid exploration and in-situ missions. In addition to asteroid exploration, the international space community is looking forward to clean space initiatives, which strive for removing inactive space debris and campaigning towards re-usability of available space resources by enabling the on-orbit servicing of an active satellite. Such demands of proximity operation targeting around small space object open a new frontier in recent space activity. In order to achieve such a diverse class of ambitious objectives, precise autonomous space navigation has critical importance. In view of that the current research reported here provides a visual navigation framework with multi-sensorial pose estimation.
The major development of the project will be focused on this work package. The work package will be targeted to establish a robust navigation architecture, that will enable precise onboard autonomous navigation around small celestial body. In order to extract precise navigation predominantly sensor measurement plays a key role. Hence selection of appropriate sensor is one of the important factor. Based on the literature review and technical discussion with OHB team, it has been decided that, primarily three types of sensors will be considered for the work package. Those are Inertial measurement unit (IMU will provide the spacecraft acceleration and body rate), Image sensor i.e. onboard camera (based on local image of asteroid, the pose of the spacecraft body can be extracted) and star tracker (provides the spacecraft orientation). The next objective will be to investigate upon novel multi-sensor fusion architecture that combines these sensor measurement using model-based filtering approach to estimate the pose of the spacecraft. Since, the motion of the spacecraft around the asteroid is predominantly governed by control forces/torques and gravitational field, the spacecraft dynamic model can be used with a sufficient degree of accuracy.
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