ABSTRACT

Interest in spacecraft formation flying is rapidly increasing thanks to its intrinsic advantages in terms of costs, flexibility, and redundancy of the systems. Due to its qualities, formation flying was recently employed around the Earth, and its applications are rapidly expanding towards and beyond the cislunar environment. For deep space applications, the long distance from Earth demands for high degrees of autonomy to ensure safe relative motion of the spacecraft. With a focus on the Lunar Gateway scenario, the present research aims at covering the topic of formations autonomy in deep space. Natural manifolds of the Earth-Moon system are explored to design drift-free formations and allow efficient reconfiguration between spacecraft. Then, suitable optimal Guidance and Control schemes are presented and discussed, with emphasis on cost-effectiveness of the developed schemes in the highly nonlinear dynamics of the cislunar environment. Strategies to improve computational efficiency will also be covered, leveraging parametrizations of the previously developed manifolds, and quadratic representation of the optimization problem.

BIOGRAPHY

Andrea Capannolo is a postdoctoral researcher at the ISAE-Supaero institute in Toulouse, France. He received his doctoral degree in Aerospace Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Milan in 2022, after earning his master’s degree in 2016 and his bachelor’s degree in 2013 from the same institution. His expertise covers the field of astrodynamics and spacecraft Guidance and Control, with several years of experience in multi-gravity dynamics, irregular gravity fields, and trajectory design and optimization for deep-space applications and asteroid exploration. Dr. Capannolo has participated in multiple funded projects including the LICIACube spacecraft, part of the NASA’s first kinetic impactor mission for planetary defense (DART).