Vision-based guidance, navigation, and control of Hayabusa spacecraft - Lessons learned from real operation

Abstract

Hayabusa spacecraft performed approaching to and landing on the asteroid Itokawa from September to November in 2005 with sophisticated vision-based navigation and guidance. The spacecraft had some autonomous functions of station-keeping, descending, touching down and sampling. Since two of three reaction wheels for attitude control had malfunctions and the autonomous guidance did not work as designed, however, a ground-based landmark optical navigation system was developed. This paper presents the navigation, guidance and control system of Hayabusa spacecraft with some flight results.