Remote Guidance of a Mothership-Daughtership Formation for Asteroid Exploration

Logan Feld; Shyam Bhaskaran; Andrew French; Joshua Lyzhoft; Koki Ho

NASA NTRS · 20260006110

Remote Guidance of a Mothership-Daughtership Formation for Asteroid Exploration

Logan Feld·Shyam Bhaskaran·Andrew French·Joshua Lyzhoft·Koki Ho

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Abstract

This work presents an application of Model Predictive Control to maintain long-term stability for a three-satellite formation around the asteroid Apophis via remote guidance. The mothership and two daughterships perform tomographic characterization with a bistatic radar. The mothership estimates the states of all three spacecraft and determines the necessary control to maintain the desired antipodal daughtership states. An Extended Kalman Filter estimates the mothership states. A Batch Least Squares algorithm estimates the daughtership states and performs maneuver reconstruction for the mothership-administered thrust commands under thruster and gravitational uncertainty. The formulation maintains the antipodal angle with growing instability amidst these uncertainties.

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Logan Feld, Shyam Bhaskaran, Andrew French, Joshua Lyzhoft, Koki Ho. Remote Guidance of a Mothership-Daughtership Formation for Asteroid Exploration. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20260006110

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