Design Reference Missions (DRMs) for Advancing Autonomy in Exploration of Small Bodies
Abstract
Small Bodies, such as near-Earth objects (NEOs), comets, and asteroids are abundant and diverse in their composition and origin. Small Bodies are good targets for advancing autonomous operations because they embody many of the challenges that occur for other destinations while being accessible by small affordable spacecraft. Autonomy would both enable missions to reach far more diverse bodies and enable greater access to those bodies than current ground-in-the-loop missions. Operating near or on these bodies is challenging because of their largely unknown, highly-rugged topographies and because of the dynamic nature of the interaction between the spacecraft and the body. The Small-Bodies DRM team suggests two autonomous DRM scenarios:
A near-term DRM (launch in 2030s) places a small satellite in Earth's orbit with a goal of reaching a selected asteroid, approaching and landing on the body, precisely accessing at least one site on the surface, sampling, analyzing the measurements, targeting follow-on measurements based on local analyses, and sending the results back to Earth—all done autonomously. A long-term DRM (launch 2040+) scenario places a centralized mother platform with multiple daughter craft in Earth orbit to scan, identify, characterize and eventually enable access to a range of Small Bodies. The mother craft would dispatch daughter craft to explore various approaching bodies. Daughter craft would visit targets to collect samples and return material to the mother craft for further analysis or resource extraction. Both scenarios require a level of autonomy not currently available. Advancements in autonomy technology required include improved computing and data handling as well as the ability to perform end-to-end, long-duration autonomous decision making, to approach and land on a body, to handle the environment, to deal with proximity interaction, to reach specific surface targets, and to manipulate the surface or subsurface. For the more ambitious DRM, additional autonomy capabilities would include resource extraction capabilities, Small Body detection, and the coordination of multiple spacecraft. Acknowledgments: Part of this work has been carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract to NASA. Government sponsorship acknowledged.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMIN34A..08S
- Keywords:
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- 0394 Instruments and techniques;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE;
- 0520 Data analysis: algorithms and implementation;
- COMPUTATIONAL GEOPHYSICS;
- 0555 Neural networks;
- fuzzy logic;
- machine learning;
- COMPUTATIONAL GEOPHYSICS;
- 0594 Instruments and techniques;
- COMPUTATIONAL GEOPHYSICS