A European consortium led by GMV and including Cosine and ODYS just started a new activity supported by the European Space Agency and overseen by ESTEC.

The GUIBEAR project aims at demonstrating the feasibility of bearings-only far-range rendezvous to near rectilinear Halo Orbits (NROs). Bearings-only rendezvous is an orbital maneuver that consists in approaching a target (in the considered scenario, the Lunar Orbital Platform – Gateway) relying only on angular measurements to such target, and using knowledge of the maneuvers previously performed in order to estimate the distance to the target.

This technique has potential to significantly cut mission costs by increasing autonomy and reducing requirements for exploration missions such as HERACLES. In fact, angular measurements can be obtained with an optical camera that has significantly lower mass and power requirements with respect to range sensors.

GUIBEAR will address this challenge by developing automatic control tools based on Model Predictive Control, to perform the rendezvous autonomously while also preserving observability of the planned trajectory.