Near Earth Asteroid Scout CubeSat Science Data Retrieval Optimization Using Onboard Data Analysis

A mission concept for the low-cost large-scale exploration and characterisation of near earth objects

“…A frame summation algorithm such as that proposed in Lightholder et al (2019) must be developed in order to allow long compound exposures to be used to acquire an image of the asteroid sufficiently early to allow TCMs to be performed. This would be the first time such a technique would have been used for navigation, however Earth-based and space-based telescopes already use this technique for astronomical observations to improve SNR.…”

“…16 shows the minimum required exposure at a given time before flyby to achieve an SNR of at least 1.5 and 3 to allow the target to be acquired. SNR of 3 is a more conservative estimate, while SNR 1.5 is the same threshold used for NEA Scout (Lightholder et al, 2019).…”

“…Frame addition is a common technique used to create large effective exposures in astronomy (White et al, 2007;Gruen et al, 2014) which could be applied to this scenario to overcome these limiting factors. Although it has never been used in the context of asteroid navigation, Lightholder et al (2019) has proposed the technique for use in the future NEA Scout mission. This would require a detailed characterization of the jitter characteristics of the ADCS unit installed in the final spacecraft to identify typical jitter slew rates and peak-to-peak magnitudes over the course of a given duration of sub-exposure.…”

Onboard Science Instrument Autonomy for the Detection of Microscopy Biosignatures on the Ocean Worlds Life Surveyor

“…The Ingenuity helicopter uses an earlier Snapdragon model (the 801), but note that the HPSC has not been deployed as it was in development as of the time of this work. A previous study by the NEAScout mission quantified onboard science processing performance changes across these two processor classes (Lightholder et al 2023a). A variety of compute operations demonstrated runtime improvements on the order of 10 × to 220 × (with a total improvement of 50 × ) when moving from megahertz-to gigahertz-scale processors.…”

Near-Earth Asteroid Scout Flight Mission

“…This science software builds on the autonomous science experiment [17] but have not been demonstrated in deep space to date. These include on-board data correction with the application of calibration data obtained in the lab; extraction of point source and its position in a frame; cropping around the extended (i.e., resolved) target; and production of thumbnails and prioritized downlink (e.g., based on image quality) for selection by the science team [12]. Calibration data will be obtained in the lab for a range of relevant temperatures and uplinked for onboard application to the image.…”