The vision-based guidance, navigation, and control system of Hera’s Milani Cubesat

Milani is a 6U CubeSat that will be released in the Didymos binary asteroid system by ESA’s Hera spacecraft. Its objectives are to study and characterize the system’s asteroids, thus demonstrating the use of miniaturized technologies for asteroid science. Milani adopts sophisticated vision-based technologies for the guidance, navigation, and control system in the asteroid’s close-proximity environment. This work elaborates on the architecture design and on the performance analysis of the image processing and the guidance, navigation, and control system of Milani, showing that they can successfully assure adequate pointing and control of the CubeSat in the Didymos environment.