Distributed Spacecraft Architecture for Persistent Autonomous Orbital Navigation in SCB Missions

Establishing a sustainable human presence beyond the cis-lunar space is undoubtedly the major focus of space agencies and commercial space organizations at present. Small celestial bodies (SCBs) like near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) have been widely recognized as a crucial stepping stone in this process. An essential requirement for any mission to SCBs is the ability of the spacecraft to navigate in the proximity of these bodies. Proximity navigation is practically very challenging and the need for target relative autonomous navigation is imperative. Since the current methods used for navigation are not completely autonomous, alternative solutions based on SLAM have been proposed in the past. For the SLAM-based solutions to be viable, the algorithm should have a computational complexity scalable with time. Although SLAM can be formulated to exhibit some parallelism, suitable architectures are essential to exploit this property. This paper presents an orbital architecture of two types of spacecraft to accomplish a persistent autonomous navigation. The architecture presents mission spacecraft in an orbit around a SCB that formulate their navigation requirement as a SLAM problem and support spacecraft in a different type of orbit that perform concurrent determination of the navigation solution. The simulation presents the numerically propagated orbits of all the spacecraft and using an empirical evaluation, reveals the utility of the distributed architecture.