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"Rendezvous"
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Linking the space shuttle and space stations : early docking technologies from concept to implementation
How could the newly authorized space shuttle help in the U.S. quest to build a large research station in Earth orbit? As a means of transporting goods, the shuttle could help supply the parts to the station. But how would the two entitles be physically linked? Docking technologies had to constantly evolve as the designs of the early space stations changed. It was hoped the shuttle would make missions to the Russian Salyut and American Skylab stations, but these were postponed until the Mir station became available, while plans for getting a new U.S. space station underway were stalled. In Linking the Space Shuttle and Space Stations, the author delves into the rich history of the Space Shuttle and its connection to these early space stations, culminating in the nine missions to dock the shuttle to Mir. By 1998, after nearly three decades of planning and operations, shuttle missions to Mir had resulted in: \" A proven system to link up the space shuttle to a space station \" Equipment and hands-on experience in handling tons of materials \" An infrastructure to support space station assembly and resupply Each of these played a pivotal role in developing the skills and procedures crucial to the creation of the later, much larger and far more complex International Space Station, as described in the companion volume Assembling and Supplying the ISS: The Space Shuttle Fulfills Its Mission.
Book
A review on rendezvous based data acquisition methods in wireless sensor networks with mobile sink
Solutions for energy hole problem in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been excessively explored using mobile sink (MS). Although, MS provides a considerable amount of energy saving and extends network lifetime. However, MS introduces varying degree of data acquisition latency depending on the trajectory followed. Therefore, rendezvous based data acquisition methods are proposed to mitigate this issue which are aimed to provide a trade-off between energy consumption and data acquisition latency. There exists a list of surveys that focus on issues related to sink mobility such as mobility aware energy efficient data acquisition schemes, mobility aware data acquisition and routing, etc. However, none of these surveys concern about the issue of providing a trade-off between energy consumption and data acquisition latency. Therefore, this review addresses the same issue and presents a taxonomy of rendezvous based data acquisition methods along with the design goals and associated designing requirements. The methods are grouped into two categories: rendezvous point (RP) based and rendezvous area (RA) based. Furthermore, a phase-wise comprehensive overview of these methods is provided which clearly unfold the way of resolving the targeted issue. Finally, the research issues and challenges are discussed in pursuit of data acquisition by MS.
Journal Article
OSIRIS-REx: Sample Return from Asteroid (101955) Bennu
In May of 2011, NASA selected the
O
rigins,
S
pectral
I
nterpretation,
R
esource
I
dentification, and
S
ecurity–
R
egolith
Ex
plorer (OSIRIS-REx) asteroid sample return mission as the third mission in the New Frontiers program. The other two New Frontiers missions are
New Horizons
, which explored Pluto during a flyby in July 2015 and is on its way for a flyby of Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 on January 1, 2019, and
Juno
, an orbiting mission that is studying the origin, evolution, and internal structure of Jupiter. The spacecraft departed for near-Earth asteroid (101955) Bennu aboard an United Launch Alliance Atlas V 411 evolved expendable launch vehicle at 7:05 p.m. EDT on September 8, 2016, on a seven-year journey to return samples from Bennu. The spacecraft is on an outbound-cruise trajectory that will result in a rendezvous with Bennu in November 2018. The science instruments on the spacecraft will survey Bennu to measure its physical, geological, and chemical properties, and the team will use these data to select a site on the surface to collect at least 60 g of asteroid regolith. The team will also analyze the remote-sensing data to perform a detailed study of the sample site for context, assess Bennu’s resource potential, refine estimates of its impact probability with Earth, and provide ground-truth data for the extensive astronomical data set collected on this asteroid. The spacecraft will leave Bennu in 2021 and return the sample to the Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR) on September 24, 2023.
Journal Article
Close-range maneuver planning for uncontrolled rendezvous with multiple elliptical orbit targets based on genetic algorithm
On-orbit debris removal is an important and challenging problem in space engineering. A low-cost method for this problem is to use uncontrolled rendezvous with a sub-spacecraft released by a service spacecraft. The sub-spacecraft do not carry any control system and are designed to rendezvous with the target debris to remove it. This paper presents a comprehensive study on the mission planning. First, we analyze and dynamically model the uncontrolled rendezvous process for elliptical orbit targets, and study various aspects such as maneuver, sub-spacecraft release parameter solution, and rendezvous accuracy estimation. Then, we use NSGA-II, a multi-objective optimization genetic algorithm, to establish the mission planning model, focusing on the design of decision variables, constraints and fitness functions. Finally, we apply our proposed method to two specific cases of Molniya orbit, and verify the effectiveness of the planning model. We also conduct a deep analysis of the planning results, and summarize the commonalities and differences of various effective strategies.
Journal Article
Uncertainty Modeling and Calibration for Spacecraft Image-Based Pose Estimation Toward On-Orbit Autonomous Measurement
Spacecraft pose estimation is a key enabling technology for on-orbit servicing, space rendezvous and docking, and related missions. However, existing deep learning-based pose estimation methods generally lack reliable uncertainty quantification capabilities, and their performance degrades significantly under the domain gap between synthetic training data and real on-orbit imagery. To address these challenges, this paper proposes the DETU-AC (Deep Evidential-based Transformer with Uncertainty-aware Adaptive Calibration) framework for uncertainty modeling and adaptive calibration in spacecraft pose estimation. The core contributions of this framework include: (1) a deep evidential learning-based keypoint detection head that employs the Normal-Inverse-Gamma (NIG) distribution to model each keypoint coordinate, enabling effective decomposition of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties; (2) the adoption of the Matrix Fisher distribution to model rotation uncertainty while fully accounting for the non-Euclidean geometry of the SO(3) manifold; and (3) a Domain-Aware adaptive Temperature Scaling (DATS) module that achieves online calibration of prediction confidence through feature distribution monitoring. Experiments on the SPEED+ benchmark dataset demonstrate that DETU-AC achieves or surpasses state-of-the-art methods across three dimensions: pose estimation accuracy, uncertainty calibration quality, and computational efficiency. Notably, the Expected Calibration Error (ECE) is reduced by over 50% compared to traditional Bayesian methods. This work provides reliable uncertainty-aware capabilities for on-orbit autonomous systems and offers significant engineering value.
Journal Article
Using Solar Sails to Rendezvous with Asteroid 2024 YR4
This paper aims to present a set of possible transfer trajectories for a rendezvous mission with asteroid 2024 YR4, using a spacecraft propelled by a photonic solar sail. Asteroid 2024 YR4 was discovered in late December 2024 and was briefly classified as Torino Scale 3 for three weeks in early 2025, before being downgraded to zero at the end of February. In this study, rapid Earth-to-asteroid transfers are analyzed by solving a typical optimal control problem, in which the thrust vector generated by the solar sail is modeled using the optical force approach. Numerical simulations are carried out assuming a low-to-medium performance solar sail, considering both a simplified orbit-to-orbit transfer and a more accurate scenario that incorporates the actual ephemerides of the celestial bodies. The numerical results indicate that a medium-performance solar sail can reach asteroid 2024 YR4, achieving the global minimum flight time and arriving before its perihelion passage in late December 2032.
Journal Article
The Rosetta mission orbiter science overview: the comet phase
The international Rosetta mission was launched in 2004 and consists of the orbiter spacecraft Rosetta and the lander Philae. The aim of the mission is to map the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko by remote sensing, and to examine its environment in situ and its evolution in the inner Solar System. Rosetta was the first spacecraft to rendezvous with and orbit a comet, accompanying it as it passes through the inner Solar System, and to deploy a lander, Philae, and perform in situ science on the comet's surface. The primary goals of the mission were to: characterize the comet's nucleus; examine the chemical, mineralogical and isotopic composition of volatiles and refractories; examine the physical properties and interrelation of volatiles and refractories in a cometary nucleus; study the development of cometary activity and the processes in the surface layer of the nucleus and in the coma; detail the origin of comets, the relationship between cometary and interstellar material and the implications for the origin of the Solar System; and characterize asteroids 2867 Steins and 21 Lutetia. This paper presents a summary of mission operations and science, focusing on the Rosetta orbiter component of the mission during its comet phase, from early 2014 up to September 2016.
This article is part of the themed issue ‘Cometary science after Rosetta’.
Journal Article
Controllable set model and characteristic analysis of long-distance guidance segment for earth departure circumlunar rendezvous
In this paper, the controllable set of long-distance guidance segment trajectories for Earth departure circumlunar rendezvous is investigated. Firstly, the mathematical model of controllable set is given according to the long-distance guidance dynamics process. Second, on the basis of the long-distance guidance trajectory design, the controllable set calculation is transformed into a multi-objective nonlinear optimal control problem, and the concept of loosely controllable set is introduced and a controllable set algorithm is proposed. Thirdly, the accuracy of the algorithm is verified by comparing the simulation example with the point design results in other literatures, which are within the envelope of the controllable set in this paper. Finally, the parameter characteristics of the controllable set of long-distance guidance trajectory are analyzed. The conclusions of the study can provide an important reference for the design of long-distance guidance trajectories in future manned lunar landing or lunar exploration missions.
Journal Article
Time-Optimal Rendezvous Trajectory Planning for Micro/Nano Satellites with Waypoint Constraints
The time-optimal rendezvous problem is crucial for efficiently executing on-orbit servicing (OOS) missions in the future. To fulfill the detection requirement during rendezvous process, it is an essential issue that the maneuvering spacecraft flies over the designated waypoint. This paper presents an innovative methodology for planning the time-optimal spacecraft rendezvous trajectory, involving the constraints related to a flyover waypoint and being forced by a constant thrust. The method is specifically designed to handle the optimal problems with the shortest and unspecified flyover time and terminal rendezvous time. First, this article outlines the scenarios for a time-optimal rendezvous that incorporates the constraints of a flyover waypoint. Second, a time-normalized relative dynamic model for maneuvering spacecraft is derived using the Clohessy–Wiltshire (CW) equation. Third, the time-optimal control output under the constant thrust is provided leveraging Pontryagin’s minimum principle (PMP). Meanwhile, an indirect solution equation is established with the constraints of relative position and velocity for the flyover waypoint during the rendezvous process. Finally, a computational methodology for solving this time-optimal problem is proposed, integrating the initial guess for the unspecified time, multi-objective particle swarm optimization using multiple search strategies (MMOPSO) and Newton–Raphson method (NRM). Simulation results demonstrate that the method can effectively and practically solve the time-optimal rendezvous trajectory planning under a constant thrust, while satisfying the constraints of the flyover waypoint. Moreover, Monte Carlo simulations are performed, the results of which indicate that the proposed methodology exhibits strong robustness and fidelity.
Journal Article
Natural and Forced Spacecraft Loitering in a Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit
With an increasing number of missions planned to cislunar space, on-orbit servicing, inspection, and docking in a multi-body environment will need to take place in highly perturbed orbits for the first time. Thus, the investigation of these relative motion trajectories between two spacecraft is critical to successfully performing rendezvous and proximity operations in a multi-body environment. In this work, mass- and time-optimal trajectories are generated for a low-thrust chaser spacecraft entering into natural and forced loiter sequences about a target on a near rectilinear halo orbit. Constraints on the allowable region for safe rendezvous and proximity operations are applied to investigate the effects on feasible loitering maneuvers. Fuel costs are compared for transfers to both forced and natural loitering trajectories to determine the propellant reduction from leveraging the relative dynamics of NRHO manifolds.
Journal Article