RIT 2021

RIT 2021 is a collaborative EU funded project with the objective to create sustainable growth in the region of Norrbotten and enhancing its role as Sweden’s leading space region. The partners belong to the academic sector, the business sector and actors within the innovation support system.

Visual Navigation around Small Celestial Body

The project is a collaborative initiative with OHB Sweden, aims to establish an autonomous visual navigation framework around small celestial objects. Exploring small celestial objects like asteroids and comets is recently emerging as a challenging trend. In search of the history of solar system evolution and trace of life, the scientific interest of celestial sample-return from Near-Earth Object and a global attentiveness growing towards the rising demand for planetary protection drives high demand for asteroid exploration and in-situ missions. To achieve such a diverse class of ambitious objectives, precise autonomous space navigation has critical importance. The project investigates upon a framework to establish a robust navigation architecture, that will enable precise onboard autonomous visual navigation around small celestial body. The project will be to investigate upon novel multi-sensor fusion architecture that combines this sensor measurement using model-based filtering approach to estimate the pose of the spacecraft.

Space agencies are racing to explore asteroids and comets for insights into Earth's origins and valuable metals. The RIT 2021 project with OHB Sweden aims for autonomous visual navigation around celestial objects, vital for diverse space missions.

Exploring small celestial objects like asteroids and comets is recently emerging as a challenging trend amongst the space agencies across the globe. In search of the history of solar system evolution and trace of life, the scientific interest of celestial sample-return from Near-Earth Object and a global attentiveness growing towards the rising demand for planetary
protection drives high demand for asteroid exploration and in-situ missions. In addition to asteroid exploration, the international space community is looking forward to clean space initiatives, which strive for removing inactive space debris and campaigning towards re-usability of available space resources by enabling the on-orbit servicing of an active satellite. Such demands of proximity operation targeting around small space object open a new frontier in recent space activity. In order to achieve such a diverse class of ambitious objectives, precise autonomous space navigation has critical importance. In view of that the current research reported here provides a visual navigation framework with multi-sensorial pose estimation. 

Exploring small celestial objects like asteroids and comets is recently emerging as a challenging trend amongst the space agencies across the globe. In search of the history of solar system evolution and trace of life, the scientific interest of celestial sample-return from Near-Earth Object and a global attentiveness growing towards the rising demand for planetary
protection drives high demand for asteroid exploration and in-situ missions. In addition to asteroid exploration, the international space community is looking forward to clean space initiatives, which strive for removing inactive space debris and campaigning towards re-usability of available space resources by enabling the on-orbit servicing of an active satellite. Such demands of proximity operation targeting around small space object open a new frontier in recent space activity. In order to achieve such a diverse class of ambitious objectives, precise autonomous space navigation has critical importance. In view of that the current research reported here provides a visual navigation framework with multi-sensorial pose estimation.