Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

Project Khepri: Mining Asteroid Bennu For Water, Erika Frost, Gowtham Boyala, Adam Gremm, Ahmet Gungor, Amirhossein Taghipour, Massimo Biella, Jiawei "Jackson" Qiu, Athip Thirupathi Raj, Arjun Chhabra, Adam Gee, Saanjali Maharaj, Erin Richardson, Julia Empey, Haidar Ali Abdul-Nabi, Lindsay Richards, Ariyaan Talukder, Aaron Groh, Brie Miklaucic, Jd Carlson, Kristina Kim, Maverick Cue

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

Deep space asteroid mining presents the opportunity for the collection of critical resources required to establish a cis-lunar infrastructure. In specific, the Project Khepri team has focused on the collection of water from asteroid Bennu. This water has the potential to provide a source of clean-energy propellant as well as an essential consumable for humans or agriculture on crewed trips to the Moon or Mars. This would avoid the high costs of launching from Earth - making it a highly desirable element for the future of cis-lunar infrastructure. The OSIRIS-REx mission provided a complete survey of asteroid Bennu and is …

Automated Image Interpretation For Science Autonomy In Robotic Planetary Exploration, Raymond Francis

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Advances in the capabilities of robotic planetary exploration missions have increased the wealth of scientific data they produce, presenting challenges for mission science and operations imposed by the limits of interplanetary radio communications. These data budget pressures can be relieved by increased robotic autonomy, both for onboard operations tasks and for decision- making in response to science data.

This thesis presents new techniques in automated image interpretation for natural scenes of relevance to planetary science and exploration, and elaborates autonomy scenarios under which they could be used to extend the reach and performance of exploration missions on planetary surfaces.

Two …