Selection and planning of asteroids for deep space autonomous optical navigation

A key technology that facilitates the autonomy of the spacecraft is to realize the autonomous optical navigation, in which the selection of the navigation signpost and asteroids and the planning of the photoing sequence are important matters. This paper proposes criterions, including visible magnitude, distance, relative velocity and angle of sight lines, on selection of asteroids, based on the trajectory scheme of exploring Ivar. Then navigation asteroids are selected under a integral evaluation. The planning of the photoing sequence is handled with an improved genetic algorithm, along with a difference selection method which optimizes the ratio of navigation evaluation to resource consumption. Simulation result indicates that this method is valid to select navigation asteroids and plan the photoing sequence.