Project description
Reducing uncertainty and increasing robustness in space exploration autonomy
Our ability to explore our cosmos increases exponentially with advanced technologies for autonomous missions. Unmanned spacecraft must travel great distances under extremely harsh conditions in largely uncharted regions. The robustness of their instrumentation for guidance, navigation and control directly impacts not only successful data retrieval but also the value of the data retrieved. Asteroids are remnants of planet formation and can tell us about the origins of our solar system. With the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the THOR project will enhance autonomous space operations focused on asteroid exploration via the integration of two quantifiable sources of uncertainty into space operation management and planning.
Objective
The overarching goal of the THOR research project is to augment space operations autonomy and robustness through uncertainty management and quantification. This involves a bottom up process where novel uncertainty estimation and propagation techniques will be employed to be subsequently embedded within a stochastic robust controller. The main outcome will be a robust non-linear non-gaussian integrated guidance, navigation and control strategy with both model-based and exogenous disturbance estimation. Since both uncertainty sources are quantified, a more reliable and efficient space operation management and planning will be obtained. The THOR scenario relates to asteroid exploration which is one of the most challenging and uncertain space operations nowadays. This is due to the limited asteroid data known prior to the arrival if the body is visited for the first time. Two mission phases can be clearly distinguished: on-orbit data collection where most of the uncertainty will be removed by estimation; then, an entry descent and landing critical phase where the stochastic robust controller will use the previous uncertainty knowledge, is envisioned. The THOR project methodology and results are expected to advance current state-of-the-art in autonomous spacecraft guidance, navigation and control, thus enabling more advanced space exploration mission concepts with a higher scientific return, without loss of generality.
Fields of science
- natural sciencesphysical sciencesastronomyspace exploration
- natural sciencesphysical sciencesastronomyplanetary sciencesasteroids
- natural sciencesmathematicsapplied mathematicsdynamical systems
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftwaresoftware development
- natural sciencesmathematicsapplied mathematicsstatistics and probability
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
41004 Sevilla
Spain