Autonomous optical navigation algorithm for small body impact mission

Aiming at the high precision requirement of the orbit determination system, an autonomous optical navigation strategy based on B-plane coordinate system was investigated for a small-body impact mission, in which the angle between the target-relative position and velocity vectors could be ignored. The algorithm used images of the target body to update target relative state information. This involved using the object center-of-figure data as the observations and then processing the data through a Kalman filter to update the impactor position and attitude components in the B-plane coordinate. Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate the feasibility of the approach, including the numerical accuracy and stability.