Robotics and autonomous technology for asteroid sample return mission

The MUSES-C mission is the world's first sample and return attempt to/from the near Earth asteroid. In deep space, it is hard to navigate, guide, and control a spacecraft on a real-time basis remotely from the earth mainly due to the communication delay. So autonomy is required for final approach and landing on an unknown body. It is important to navigate and guide a spacecraft to the landing point without hitting rocks or big stones. In the final descent phase, cancellation of the horizontal speed relative to the surface of the landing site is essential. This paper describes various kinds of robotics technologies applied for MUSES-C mission. A global mapping method, an autonomous descent scheme, and a novel sample-collection method, and asteroid exploration robot are proposed and presented in detail. The validity and the effectiveness of the proposed methods are confirmed and evaluated by numerical simulations and some experiments.