Navigating Irregular Gravity: Planning Attitude Control for Near-Earth Asteroid Missions

Near- Earth Asteroids (NEAs) are an increasing area of study in the scientific community and growing space industry. NEAs present multiple reasons for closer examination, including resource extraction, investigating the presence of ingredients to life, early solar system composition, and planetary defense. As our space capabilities grow, missions like NASA’s NEAR Shoemaker, OSIRIS-Rex, and JAXA’s Hayabusa will likely become more frequent. Currently, standard astrodynamics software lacks the ability to characterize the gravitation around these irregular bodies and translate that into orbital parameters ahead of designing missions around those asteroids. In this research, we present a framework that utilizes the Polyhedral Method to serve as a skeleton in efficient gravitational modeling. In this framework, we compare our simulation results to mission data and similar previous simulations to validate our model. Asteroid 433 Eros’ gravitational field has been well studied and serves as a benchmark to validate the gravitational field of any celestial body with an assumed homogeneous density. We believe this research will assist in the need for fast characterization of irregular gravitational fields by streamlining close flyby mission design. This tool will further assist in the process of designing control systems during both spacecraft development and operations in the non-cooperative asteroid environment.