Gianmario Merisio

Politecnico di Milano | Polimi · Department of Aerospace Engineering

Missions around small bodies present many challenges from their design to the operations, due to the highly non-linear and uncertain dynamics, the limited ∆v budget and constraints coming from orbit determination and mission design. Within this context, mathematical tools to enhance the understanding of the dynamics behavior can be proven useful to...

Ballistic capture orbits offer safer Mars injection at longer transfer time. However, the search for such an extremely rare event is a computationally intensive process. Indeed, it requires the propagation of a grid sampling the whole search space. This work proposes a novel ballistic capture search algorithm based on Taylor differential algebra pr...

The Lunar Meteoroid Impacts Observer (LUMIO) is a CubeSat mission to observe, quantify, and characterize the meteoroid impacts on the lunar farside by detecting their flashes. This complements the knowledge gathered by Earth-based observations of the lunar nearside, thus synthesizing global information on the lunar meteoroid environment and contrib...

The Lunar Meteoroid Impacts Observer (LUMIO) is a CubeSat mission to observe, quantify, and characterize the meteoroid impacts by detecting their flashes on the lunar farside. It complements lunar nearside observations performed by ground-based observatories to yield global information synthesis on the lunar meteoroid environment. Predicting LUMIO’...

The Earth-Moon system is constantly bombarded by meteoroids of different size and impact speed. Observation of the impacts on the Moon can enable thorough characterization of the Lunar meteoroid flux, which is similar to that of the Earth. While Earth-based Lunar observations are restricted by weather, geometric and illumination conditions, a Lunar...

Ballistic capture corridors allow a spacecraft to be temporarily captured about a planet without any thrust firing. They represent a promising approach for future deep-space small-satellites missions, where only limited fuel can be carried onboard. In an effort to enable autonomous interplanetary CubeSats, a guidance algorithm based on convex optim...

The Lunar Meteoroid Impact Observer (LUMIO) is a mission designed to observe, quantify, and characterize the impacts of meteoroids on the lunar far side and, therefore, complement in both space and time the observations currently taken from Earth. While Earth-based lunar observations are restricted by weather, geometric and illumination conditions,...

A new space era is fast approaching. In this decade, CubeSats have granted affordable access to space due to their reduced manufacturing costs compared to traditional missions. Although most of miniaturized spacecraft has thus far been deployed into near-Earth orbits, soon a multitude of CubeSats will be employed for deep-space missions as well. By...

Current deep-space missions heavily count on ground-based operations. Although reliable, ground slots will saturate soon, so hampering the current momentum in space exploration. EXTREMA, a project awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2019, enables self-driving spacecraft, challenging the current paradigm and aiming, among others, at autonomously en...

Vast amounts of meteoroids and micrometeoroids continuously enter the Earth–Moon system and consequently become a potential threat. Lunar meteoroid impacts have caused a substantial change in the lunar surface and its properties. The Moon having no atmospheric blanket to protect itself, it is subjected to impacts from meteoroids ranging from a few...

The LUnar Meteoroid Impacts Observer (LUMIO) is a CubeSat mission to a halo orbit at Earth–Moon L2 that shall observe, quantify, and characterize meteoroid impacts on the Lunar farside, by detecting their flashes. In this way, LUMIO is expected to significantly contribute to Lunar Situational Awareness and to the current knowledge on the evolution...

The Lunar Meteoroid Impacts Observer (LUMIO) is a CubeSat mission to observe, quantify, and characterise the meteoroid impacts by detecting their flashes on the lunar far-side. This complements the knowledge gathered by Earth-based observations of the lunar nearside, thus synthesising a global information on the lunar meteoroid environment. In this...

The Lunar Meteoroid Impact Observer (LUMIO) is a CubeSat mission to observe, quantify, and characterise the meteoroid impacts by detecting their flashes on the lunar far-side. This complements the knowledge gathered by Earth-based observations of the lunar nearside, thus synthesising a global information on the lunar meteoroid environment. LUMIO en...