New Spacecraft Steering Method Could Make Asteroid Missions Safer

Autonomous small-body proximity operations require continuous-thrust guidance under uncertain gravity, solar-radiation pressure (SRP), and stochastic disturbances. We combine iterative covariance steering (iCS) with $L_1$ distributionally robust adaptive control ($L_1$-DRAC) to provide risk-aware collision avoidance despite mismatch between the nominal planning model and the true dynamics.

Iterative covariance steering plans a nominal feedback policy satisfying distributionally robust conditional value-at-risk keep-out constraints, while $L_1$-DRAC compensates for dynamics uncertainty and bounds the residual distributional mismatch through a Wasserstein radius used by the planner. In $\mathbf{1000}$ paired Monte Carlo trials with gravity, SRP, and diffusion mismatch, $L_1$-DRAC adaptive control reduces the keep-out violation rate from $\mathbf{32.7\%}$ to $\mathbf{0.2\%}$ and the physical collision rate from $\mathbf{16.4\%}$ to zero, without actuator saturation.