Milani is a 6U CubeSat that will visit the Didymos binary system as part of the Hera mission. Its objectives are both scientific and technological: to study and characterize the asteroid environment, and to demonstrate the use of CubeSat technologies for interplanetary missions. The latter includes optical-based autonomous navigation algorithms in a close-proximity environment, which are enabled by robust image processing functions. In this work, for the first time, the design of the image processing of Milani is described in detail. Its algorithmic core is divided among two blocks: the blobs characterization and the observables extraction. The former one extracts low-level optical observables while distinguishing the primary from the secondary of the Didymos system. The latter processes the input of the previous block to generate higher-level observables such as the center of figure, the range, and the phase angle. These estimates are generated thanks to data-driven functions which are tuned on a global dataset representative of the geometric conditions which Milani would encounter during its mission. After a detailed description of its functionalities, the image processing is tested on two datasets representative of the nominal mission phases: the far range phase and the close range phase. After the characterization of the various algorithms, it is demonstrated that Milani’s image processing is capable of robustly generating a set of optical observables to be used on-board by the GNC and the rest of the CubeSat.
DESIGN OF THE ON-BOARD IMAGE PROCESSING OF THE MILANI MISSION
Proceedings of the 44th Annual American Astronautical Society Guidance, Navigation, and Control Conference, 2022 ; Chapter : 72 ; 1303-1323
2024-01-01
21 pages
Article/Chapter (Book)
Electronic Resource
English
Trajectory Options for Hera’s Milani CubeSat Around (65803) Didymos
Springer Verlag | 2021
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