February 14, 2025
Research sheds light on using multiple CubeSats for in-space servicing and repair missions
by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
As more satellites, telescopes, and other spacecraft are built to be repairable, it will take reliable trajectories for service spacecraft to reach them safely. Researchers in the Department of Aerospace Engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are developing a methodology that will allow multiple CubeSats to act as servicing agents to assemble or repair a space telescope.
Published in The Journal of the Astronautical Sciences, their method minimizes fuel consumption, guarantees that servicing agents never come closer to each other than 5 meters, and can be used to solve pathway guidance problems that aren't space related.
"We developed a scheme that allows the CubeSats to operate efficiently without colliding," said aerospace Ph.D. student Ruthvik Bommena. "These small spacecraft have limited onboard computation capabilities, so these trajectories are precomputed by mission design engineers."
Bommena and his faculty adviser Robyn Woollands demonstrated the performance of the algorithm by simulating two, three or four vehicle swarms simultaneously transporting modular components between a service vehicle and a space telescope undergoing in-space servicing.
"These are difficult trajectories to compute and calculate, but we came up with a novel technique that guarantees its optimality," Bommena said.
Bommena said the most difficult aspect is the scale of the distances. The James Webb Space Telescope's orbit is about 1.5 million kilometers away, at the sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2. It's where the gravitational force of the sun and Earth balance each other, making it the perfect place in space for deep-space observation satellites to maintain orbit while facing away from the sun.
More information: Ruthvik Bommena et al, Indirect Trajectory Optimization with Path Constraints for Multi-Agent Proximity Operations, The Journal of the Astronautical Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1007/s40295-024-00470-7
Provided by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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