Advancing Spacecraft Autonomy for Interplanetary Transfers: Outcomes from the EXTREMA Project

Kurzfassung

The increasing number of interplanetary spacecraft challenges the traditional reliance on the Deep-Space Network, which is costly and limited in capacity. The ERC-funded EXTREMA project pioneers a fully autonomous vision-based navigation (VBN) solution that allows spacecraft to determine their state using only planetary observations. This talk will showcase the validation and verification ecosystem developed to raise the VBN technology to TRL 3, including software-, model-,and hardware-in-the-loop simulations with real hardware and open-sky testing. This work presents insights into the navigation chain, testbed design and calibration, and outcomes that pave the way toward scalable autonomous deep-space missions.