Autonomous navigation and guidance for landing on asteroids

This paper presents an autonomous landing navigation and guidance scheme for future asteroid sample return mission. An autonomous navigation scheme based on feature tracking technology is brought out firstly; secondly, desired descent landing trajectories with the initial and terminal constraints are planned in order to achieve arrive-at-time landing on an asteroid; then, two guidance control laws, based on error phase analysis method and PD plus PWPF method respectively, are designed to track reference descent trajectory; finally, the validity of the proposed scheme is confirmed by computer simulation.