ESA GNC Conference Papers Repository

The LICIACube mission will be the first CubeSat Mission to visit a binary system of asteroids, providing useful scientific data related to small bodies composition and information about effectiveness of kinetic impactors, for planetary defense. The CubeSat will depart together with the NASA?s mission ?DART? (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) and will witness the impact between the American spacecraft and the moonlet of the binary system 65803 ?Didymos?. Maintaining a constant pointing of the target asteroid is of the utmost importance for the mission, and a suitable controller design is required to withstand the steep change in relative velocity. The paper introduces the design of a baseline Proportional-Derivative controller to test pointing maintenance capability of classical schemes, then proposes an adaptive scheme with variable gains as function of the relative CubeSat-asteroid state. The two schemes are compared and advantages or disadvantages in adopting the more complex, adaptive scheme, are discussed.