Autonomous Optical and Inertial Navigation of a Solar-sail Propelled CubeSat Class Spacecraft Targeting Mars and its Moons

A successful space mission depends on crucial systems and teams working together. Designing a feasible trajectory for the spacecraft that satisfies the goals of the mission, accurately conducting simulations on a digital twin to control the health and fluidity of operations, and navigating to correctly estimate the location of the spacecraft in space are just a few of the vital responsibilities that a space mission brings. In this paper, space navigation, specifically optical spacecraft navigation, is put to the test with the help of many Freeware and Free Open Source Software tools such as Wolfram Mathematica and Jupyter Notebook to see the validity of an optical navigation model. Direct and inverse problems are proposed to calculate and observe whether it is possible to accurately measure the topocentric ecliptic and celestial coordinates of 55 systematically chosen beacon asteroids of known heliocentric Cartesian coordinates. Then, going in reverse, as the inverse problem, computing the heliocentric coordinates to compare with the original known values establishes the model's reliability. By doing so, systematic errors were identified and discussed.