cubesat – Politecnico di Milano – Progress in Research

LUMIO mission: Politecnico leads phase B

Posted on 07/11/202208/11/2022 by admin

Politecnico di Milano and the European Space Agency (ESA) have signed the contract for the development of the Phase B study of the LUMIO mission (Lunar Meteoroid Impacts Observer). After a successful Phase A carried out in 2020-2021, the Phase B has been kicked off on September 28th, 2022, and will last 12 months.

The study will be led by the DART group at the Department of Aerospace Science and Technology, and has the objective of consolidating the mission design and the CubeSat platform/payload design.

LUMIO is framed within ESA’s GSTP, and has received support from the national delegations of Italy (ASI) and Norway (NOSA).

The European consortium for the LUMIO mission is constituted by Politecnico di Milano, Argotec, Leonardo, IMT, Nautilus, and S&T Norway.

Our university is leading the consortium and will be responsible for the LUMIO mission analysis, guidance, navigation, and control system, autonomous navigation experiment, scientific elaboration of mission data, and the management of the project.

Argotec will lead the CubeSat system design, Leonardo will be responsible for the LUMIO-Cam payload design, IMT will develop the X-band transponder and the solar array drive mechanism, and Nautilus will design the ground segment and the flight dynamics operations. Moreover, S&T Norway will be responsible for the on-board payload data processing unit design to process the data gathered by the LUMIO-Cam.

LUMIO is a 12 units CubeSat, which means that it has a dimension of approximately 20x20x30 cm with a mass of around 25 kg. The miniaturized satellite will fly on a sophisticated orbit about the lagrangian point L2 of the Earth-Moon system.

The objective is monitoring the far side of the Moon to detect light flashes associated to meteoroid impacts. This is to complement data gathered by Earth-based observatories and to refine the meteoroid flux models hitting the Earth-Moon system. The high frame-rate images acquired by the LUMIO-Cam will be processed in real time and onboard to detect the light flashes due to the impacts and they will be downloaded on ground for further elaboration.

Politecnico di Milano takes part in the launch of the dart probe by NASA

Posted on 05/11/202105/11/2021 by User User

The DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) by NASA will be launched on board of a SpaceX Falcon 9 from the Vandenberg base in California. With this probe, NASA will be experimentally testing, for the first time, the possibility of deviating the trajectory of an asteroid that poses a potential threat to the Earth, through controlled impact: DART will, in fact, hit the smaller of the two asteroids in the binary system called Didymos in an attempt to change its orbit.

Fundamental to the success of this mission is the contribution made by the small satellite called LiciaCube (Light Italian Cubesat for Imaging of Asteroids), a small all-Italian probe and the first European CubeSat vehicle to travel into deep space, far from the Earth.

The 6U CubeSat (10x20x30xm) will be ejected from DART 10 days before impact with the Dimorphos asteroid. The LiciaCube will then continue in autonomous navigation, with the important task of capturing images of DART and Dimorphos during the impact, of the crater and the fragments generated, enabling essential data to be gathered for the study of this small celestial body and to check the dynamics of the impact.

LiciaCube, the first deep space mission developed and managed by an all-Italian team under the guide of the Italian Space Agency has seen contribution by the researchers in the ASTRA research group headed by Professor Michèle Lavagna, Andrea Capannolo and Giovanni Zanotti, from the Department of Aerospace Science and Technology at Politecnico di Milano. They were responsible for designing the ejection trajectory and manoeuvring profile that will ensure a correct approach to the celestial body and recording of the cloud of fragments without putting this small satellite at the risk of collision.

Credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab

In 2024 Politecnico is back to Space with ESA

Posted on 15/06/202111/10/2021 by admin

After contributing to Rosetta Mission, in 2024 Politecnico di Milano will be back to deep space. That year ESA, the European Space Agency, will launch the Hera spacecraft towards binary asteroid Didymos, the smallest ever visited object by a space mission: an asteroid of approximately 780 metres diameter, having a tiny moon Dimorphos of approximately 160 metres. After arrival, Hera will release two shoebox-sized satellites, namely CubeSats.

The Department of Aerospace Science and Technology of Politecnico di Milano is part of the industrial team selected by ESA to develop the “CubeSat Milani” onboard Hera. The team, led by Prof. Francesco Topputo, will be responsible of the design of the CubeSat’s trajectory and its GNC (Guidance, Navigation and Control) system. The CubeSat is named after Andrea Milani, professor of orbital mechanics at University of Pisa, who passed away in 2018.

The employment of CubeSats in such mission is extremely ambitious and is a fundamental step towards the future development of low-cost exploration of the Solar System, yet providing high science and technology return. For the first time in space exploration history, the CubeSats ought to be able to operate autonomously, more than 10 million kilometres away from Earth, in the yet unexplored and largely unknown binary asteroid environment.

From the scientific point of view, the CubeSat will provide invaluable insights on the physical and dynamical properties of Didymos and Dimorphos. The binary system will be investigated by collecting data and close-up images near the surface of the two asteroids. In particular, the CubeSat will act as building block to InterSatellite Link, the first interplanetary, intersatellite communication link between Hera and its two CubeSats. The CubeSat will act as a technology demonstrator and will test for the first time innovative GNC algorithms, to support the autonomous guidance, navigation, and control of the CubeSat in deep space. More, the impossibility to have direct communication with Earth ground station, but only through relay with Hera, and its limited propulsion capability, make the Second CubeSat aboard Hera one of the most interesting technological challenges of the incoming years.

Hera is the European contribution to the joint ESA-NASA mission AIDA (Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment), which will be the first ever planetary defense mission. Its goal is to test and validate the planetary defense technique referred to as “kinetic impactor”, which consist in deflecting the orbital path of an asteroid by means of a high-velocity impact.