Paolo Panicucci

Politecnico di Milano | Polimi · Department of Aerospace Engineering

The heterogeneity of the small body population complicates the prediction of the small body properties before the spacecraft's arrival. In the context of autonomous small body exploration, it is crucial to develop algorithms that estimate the small body characteristics before orbit insertion and close proximity operations. This paper develops a vis...

A new era of space exploration and exploitation is fast approaching. A multitude of spacecraft will flow in the future decades under the propulsive momentum of the new space economy. Yet, the flourishing proliferation of deep-space assets will make it unsustainable to pilot them from ground with standard radiometric tracking. The adoption of autono...

Small bodies’ exploration highlighted the need to develop new algorithms for deep space probes navigation. The estimation of the small-body shape is a crucial step for relative navigation, mission planning, and gravity investigation. This paper develops a shape from silhouette algorithm that takes as input a series of images to construct a polyhedr...

Enceladus is an icy world with potentially habitable conditions, as suggested by the coincident presence of a subsurface ocean, an active energy source due to water-rock interactions, and the basic chemical ingredients necessary for terrestrial life. Among all ocean worlds in our Solar System, Enceladus is the only active body that provides direct...

The increase in number of interplanetary probes has emphasized the need for spacecraft autonomy to reduce overall mission costs and to enable riskier operations without ground support. The perception of the external environment is a critical task for autonomous probes, being fundamental for both motion planning and actuation. Perception is often ac...

A new era of space exploitation is fast approaching. An exponential number of CubeSats, shoe-boxed spacecraft, will be launched into space, owing to their low cost compared to traditional probes. At the current pace, piloting CubeSats from the ground with standard radiometric tracking will become unsustainable. This work tackles the problem from th...

The adoption of CubeSats marks the beginning of new momentum in interplanetary exploration, owing to their low cost as compared to standard missions. Yet, the proliferation of deep-space CubeSats will cause the saturation of the ground networks, hindering the traditional navigation through ground-based radiometric tracking. The solution to this iss...

Image processing and vision-based navigation algorithms require images for design , testing, and validation. For space exploration purposes, it is complex if not impossible to retrieve realistic images. To mitigate this, two approaches can be used: high-fidelity rendering of celestial bodies or hardware-in-the-loop testing. In this work, we focus o...

View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2022-1193.vid Image processing and vision-based navigation algorithms require images for design, testing, and validation. For space exploration purposes, it is complex if not impossible to retrieve realistic images. To mitigate this, two approaches can be used: high-fidelity rendering of celestial...

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...

The proliferation of deep-space probes is posing new challenges in navigating them with ground-in-the-loop methods. Ground tracking stations will reach saturation owing to the escalation of small satellites in deep space. Thus, autonomous guidance, navigation, and control methods that are independent from ground communications are necessary for fut...

During close approach to a small body, it is necessary to reconstruct the small body shape and to estimate the relative geometry between the small body and the probe. This implies to define the small-body-fixed reference frame, to perform the rotational dynamics characterization, to localize the probe with respect to the small-body-fixed reference...

Image Processing algorithms for vision-based navigation require reliable image simulation capacities. In this paper we explain why traditional rendering engines may present limitations that are potentially critical for space applications. We introduce Airbus SurRender software v7 and provide details on features that make it a very powerful space im...

Ceres, as revealed by NASA's Dawn spacecraft, is an ancient, crater-saturated body dominated by low-albedo clays. Yet, localised sites display a bright, carbonate mineralogy that may be as young as 2 Myr. The largest of these bright regions (faculae) are found in the 92 km Occator Crater, and would have formed by the eruption of alkaline brines fro...

The exploration of small bodies in the Solar system and the ability to perform remote or in situ science is tied to the understanding of the dynamical environment of such objects. As such, the evaluation of the gravity field arising from small bodies is key to this understanding. However, remote observations can only produce shape estimates, from w...

The increasing interest towards exploring small bodies in the Solar system has paved the way for the investigation of different gravity field models allowing robust orbit design and dynamical environment characterization. Among these, the spherical harmonics representation and the polyhedral gravity model are the most employed and studied—the forme...

Small bodies exploration highlighted the need to develop new algorithms and solutions for deep space probes navigation. The limited knowledge of small bodies properties imposes numerous challenges in mission design and spacecraft operation. In particular, the time required for communication and the uncertainty on small body parameters estimation re...

Using thrusters for either orbital maneuvers or attitude control change the current spacecraft mass properties and results in an associated reaction force and torque. To perform orbital and attitude control using thrusters, or to obtain optimal trajectories, the impact of mass variation and depletion of the spacecraft must be thoroughly understood....

Using thrusters for either orbital maneuvers or attitude control change the current spacecraft mass properties and results in an associated reaction force and torque. To perform orbital and attitude control using thrusters, or to obtain optimal trajectories, the impact of mass variation and depletion of the spacecraft must be thoroughly understood....