As an emerging multi-satellite cooperative flight mode, the microsatellite swarm has become an important future research issue for distributed space systems. It offers low cost, rapid response, and collaborative decision-making. To address the coordination of swarms for autonomous agents, a probabilistic guidance approach has been investigated, which contained sub-swarms with different mission objectives.

Probabilistic swarm guidance enables autonomous microsatellites to generate their individual trajectories independently so that the entire swarm converges to the desired distribution shape. However, it is essential to avoid crowding for reducing the possibility of collisions between microsatellites, which adds challenges to the design of the collision avoidance algorithm.

In a research paper recently published in Space: Science & Technology, Bing Xiao, from School of Automation, Northwestern Polytechnical University, proposed a Centroidal Voronoi tessellation (CVT) and Model Predictive Control (MPC) based synthesis method, aiming to achieve macro-micro trajectory optimization of a microsatellite swarm.

Since return mission Hayabusa2 brought samples of asteroid Ryugu back to Earth in 2020, a team of experts from across the world have been examining them to learn more about the origins of our solar system.

Carbonaceous chondrites, such as the Winchcombe meteorite which fell to Earth and was retrieved in Gloucestershire in 2021, are an extremely rare group of meteorites which have been known to contain organics and amino acids—ingredients for life. They are the most primitive and pristine materials of the solar system and can provide unique information on where water and the building blocks of life were formed, and what planets are made from.

Ryugu returned

In this study, published Oct. 20 in the journal Science Advances, the team conclude that Ryugu, now a near-Earth object, was among the group of asteroids known as the Cb-type which formed billions of kilometers away from Earth, toward the edge of the sun's influence, in a region of space such as the Kuiper Belt, or perhaps even deeper into space.

Professor Sara Russell, A senior research lead at the museum who co-authored the paper, says, "It's only within the last decade we've begun to appreciate just how far objects in the solar system can move towards, and away from, the sun.