In the Oct. (vol. 223) issue of Acta Astronautica:
Kusumoto, T. Yasuda, S. Sugawara, Y. et al. Performance evaluation of rebound damping of targe… p. 36 .06.042
Cottiga, S. Caruso, M. Gallina, P. et al. Proprioceptive swarms for celestial body exploration
p. 159 .07.001
Mitchell, A. M. Panicucci, P. Franzese, V. et al. Improved detection of a Near-Earth Asteroid from…
p. 695 .07.010
Cline, B. C. Pascarella, A. Woollands, R. M. et al. Indirect optimal control techniques for multimo…
p. 759 .07.020
The Hayabusa and Haya2 missions used “beanbag” target markers. The “mothership” dropped soft containers, with conforming mass inside and reflector dots outside. These served as navigation aids, for subsequent ‘landing’ (such as it is) attempts on an asteroid with no other nav aids. Kusumoto et al. ask what did we learn about “beanbag” landing, what can we improve for later missions, and can we expand ‘landing aid’ into something to actually function per its own ends?
And speaking of inexpensive landing, Cottiga et al. propose swarms of such ‘lander’ vehicles. A ‘mothership’ lander would first make a conventional touchdown on some body. Then it would eject tens to maybe hundreds of sub-landers; the collective data gathered from multiple points of view scales far beyond that of the single big lander. This also saves the problem of mobility (i. e., rovers, or even hoppers). For a small body (asteroid/comet), the microgravity means a simple ejection method can give surprising coverage.
But before landers/dockers/sublanders can deploy, a craft must first spot and home in on the asteroid/comet in question. Mitchell et al. show how even an inexpensive space probe, with simple camera, can spot its quarry from afar. Image stacking allows detection of faint bodies, despite the tiny cameras available to compact/inexpensive/both probes. If you know where a target is already, stacking is trivial. But what if you don’t know exactly where it is… because that’s the point?
Once the destination is locked on, odds are a course correction is needed to home in. But these small, inexpensive missions can’t pack full-blown propulsion systems, as they did in OldSpace. NewSpace may entail either micropropulsion, electric (high-efficiency) thrusters, or both. But microthrusters have a hard time in deep space, high-energy projects, while electric propulsion is bad for big accelerations, like terminal course correction. What would a dual-prop mission look like, and how would we, the project, plan its trajectory?
NewSpace is not simply about taking OldSpace spacecraft, and cutting mass/cost. NewSpace is about tossing old ways of thinking; a NewSpace mission may not even look like an OldSpace program, because why should it?