KaNaRiA - Kognitionsbasierte, autonome Navigation am Beispiel des Ressourcenabbaus im All 

KaNaRiA (from its German acronym: Kognitionsbasierte, autonome Navigation am Beispiel des Ressourcenabbaus im All) is a joint venture of the University of Bremen and the Universität der Bundeswehr in Munich financed by the German Aerospace Centre (DLR - Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt).

The project comprises two major goals:

• To perform a feasibility study of an autonomous asteroid mining mission
• To build a software mission simulator to serve as platform for the development, test and verification of autonomous spacecraft navigation algorithm

The extraction of asteroid resources is of high interest for a great number of upcoming deep space missions aiming at a combined industrial, commercial and scientific utilization of space. The main technology driver enabling complex mission concepts in deep space is on-board autonomy. Such mission concepts generally include long cruise phases, multi-body fly-bys, planetary approach and rendezvous, orbiting in a-priori unknown dynamic environments, controlled descent, precise soft landing, docking or impacting, surface navigation or hopping.

In KaNaRiA the focus is set on an asteroid mining mission scenario. The fundamental scope of the project is to design a spacecraft autonomous navigation system with decision capabilities inspired on biological and cognitive-based strategies.

The Professorship of Navigation is in charge of the design of the KaNaRiA spacecraft navigation subsystem including:

• instrumentation,
• on-board orbit and attitude determination algorithms,
• on-board inertial and relative navigation and
• dynamic characterization of the target asteroid based on on-board available information.