Presented By: Aerospace Engineering
Chair's Distinguished Lecture: Novel Tools for Space Mission Design, Control & Guidance
Vishala Arya
Ph.D. Candidate
Aerospace Engineering
Texas A&M University
With innovations in propulsion and material technology, we have entered an era involving long duration missions that conduct science experiments revolving about some specific planets or asteroids in deep space. The advent of electric propulsion technology resulting in multi-year, low-thrust missions has inspired investigation into enhanced optimization techniques for designing the ensuing trajectories more efficiently. Moreover, the complex sub-systems of these low thrust engines (like DAWN’s NSTAR, NEXT, Psyche’s SPT-140) provide unprecedented system-level challenges for co-optimization of trajectory and spacecraft for a holistic optimized mission. This work describes novel extensions of classical indirect methods to optimize such systems involving inequality constraints, discontinuities in states and controls and abrupt time triggered events. Furthermore, innovative methods will be introduced that enable multiple preliminary trade-off aspects like mission objectives, propulsion constraints, solar power sub-systems and parameters, trajectory design and operational constraints. These challenges are addressed by an ingenious inclusion of spacecraft system level optimization in the preliminary mission design phase. The result is an indirect multi-disciplinary optimization (MDO) family of methods for missions. The approach is a fusion of invariant embedding, and mixed integer nonlinear programming with calculus of variation that very significantly expands the current class of trajectory optimization problems solvable by classical methods. The work also introduces an original stochastic, covariance constrained guidance approach for strategizing tracking, re-planning and associated contingencies for space missions. This novel contribution to the literature is anticipated to be the initiating step towards an autonomous guidance approach that enables cooperative autonomy, reliability and precision of future missions. The presented methods yield breakthrough recipes for system-level optimization involving realistic discrete operational constraints/events/multi-mode actuators with an attribute of real-time re-planning capability. The optimization approach while demonstrated on aerospace dynamical systems has a wide applicability.
About the speaker...
Vishala Arya is a Ph.D. candidate at the aerospace department of Texas A & M University working under the supervision of Dr. John Junkins. Her research strengths are analytical dynamics, orbital mechanics, optimal control, system optimization and computational methods. She is currently researching direct and indirect-based methods for mission design including co-optimization of spacecraft, trajectory, and propulsion parameters of multi-mode solar propulsion systems. Her research also includes autonomous and fault-tolerant guidance of spacecraft for low thrust interplanetary maneuvers, and stochastic control principles for non-linear systems. She is a recipient of John V Breakwell award at AAS Space Flight Mechanics conference and a student paper award at the AAS Guidance, Navigation and Control conference. She is currently a research fellow at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory working on the Grace Follow-On mission.
Ph.D. Candidate
Aerospace Engineering
Texas A&M University
With innovations in propulsion and material technology, we have entered an era involving long duration missions that conduct science experiments revolving about some specific planets or asteroids in deep space. The advent of electric propulsion technology resulting in multi-year, low-thrust missions has inspired investigation into enhanced optimization techniques for designing the ensuing trajectories more efficiently. Moreover, the complex sub-systems of these low thrust engines (like DAWN’s NSTAR, NEXT, Psyche’s SPT-140) provide unprecedented system-level challenges for co-optimization of trajectory and spacecraft for a holistic optimized mission. This work describes novel extensions of classical indirect methods to optimize such systems involving inequality constraints, discontinuities in states and controls and abrupt time triggered events. Furthermore, innovative methods will be introduced that enable multiple preliminary trade-off aspects like mission objectives, propulsion constraints, solar power sub-systems and parameters, trajectory design and operational constraints. These challenges are addressed by an ingenious inclusion of spacecraft system level optimization in the preliminary mission design phase. The result is an indirect multi-disciplinary optimization (MDO) family of methods for missions. The approach is a fusion of invariant embedding, and mixed integer nonlinear programming with calculus of variation that very significantly expands the current class of trajectory optimization problems solvable by classical methods. The work also introduces an original stochastic, covariance constrained guidance approach for strategizing tracking, re-planning and associated contingencies for space missions. This novel contribution to the literature is anticipated to be the initiating step towards an autonomous guidance approach that enables cooperative autonomy, reliability and precision of future missions. The presented methods yield breakthrough recipes for system-level optimization involving realistic discrete operational constraints/events/multi-mode actuators with an attribute of real-time re-planning capability. The optimization approach while demonstrated on aerospace dynamical systems has a wide applicability.
About the speaker...
Vishala Arya is a Ph.D. candidate at the aerospace department of Texas A & M University working under the supervision of Dr. John Junkins. Her research strengths are analytical dynamics, orbital mechanics, optimal control, system optimization and computational methods. She is currently researching direct and indirect-based methods for mission design including co-optimization of spacecraft, trajectory, and propulsion parameters of multi-mode solar propulsion systems. Her research also includes autonomous and fault-tolerant guidance of spacecraft for low thrust interplanetary maneuvers, and stochastic control principles for non-linear systems. She is a recipient of John V Breakwell award at AAS Space Flight Mechanics conference and a student paper award at the AAS Guidance, Navigation and Control conference. She is currently a research fellow at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory working on the Grace Follow-On mission.
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