Ricerc@Sapienza

Recently, several Countries have shown an increasing interest toward robotic or human missions to the Moon. Ascent path and orbit injection represent a crucial issue for a lunar module, because the dynamical conditions at injection affect the subsequent phases of spaceflight. This research proposes the original combination of two techniques applied to lunar ascent modules, i.e. (i) the variable-time-domain neighboring optimal guidance (VTD-NOG), and (ii) a constrained proportional-derivative (CPD) attitude control algorithm.

The paper describes the design and development of an autonomous, low-cost, lowpower, low-mass attitude sensor, that requires no computational resources from the On-Board Computer. Application domain is small satellites (micro- and nano-satellites) the vast majority of which does not have a precision attitude determination and control, due to excessive cost, weight, volume and energy demand requirements, hard to meet in general when satellites have such small dimensions.