A revolution in spacecraft guidance, navigation and control technology has started with GPS to autonomously provide spacecraft position, attitude and time information. This new technology is being applied to spacecraft constellations to achieve the precision formation flying required for many proposed science and commercial missions. These innovations will also result in significant reductions ...

Atmospheric pressure glow-discharge (APGD) plasmas have been proposed for sterilizing spacecraft surfaces prior to launch. The advantages of APGD plasmas for the sterilization of spacecraft surfaces include low temperatures at treatment sites, rapid inactivation kinetics of exposed microbial cells, physical degradation and removal of microbial cells, physical removal of organic biosignature mol...

A salient feature of the manned spacecraft is the predominance of discrete information in the manual control loop of the onboard systems. Specifically, command-signaling control panels (CSCP) as a subsystem of the manual control loop are widely used in the Russian manned spacecraft. In this paper CSCP are classified into four types: a) control panels based on multichannel control; b) control pa...

National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) aims to capture a Near Earth Orbit (NEO) asteroid or a piece of a large asteroid and transport it to the Earth–Moon system. In this paper, we provide a detailed analysis of one of the main control challenges for the first ARM mission concept, namely despinning and three-axis stabilizing the asteroid and spacecraft c...