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Ing Juan L. Cano

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Juan Luis Cano is an Aeronautical Engineer graduated in 1994 at the School of Aeronautics of the Technical University of Madrid. Between 1995 and 1997 he enjoyed a grant at ESA / ESTEC at the Aerothermodynamics Section participating in several atmospheric ascent and re-entry studies as FESTIP and X-38. He then joined GMV in Spain and moved for two years to the Mission Analysis Section at ESA / ESOC in Germany, where he did support the SMART-1 study in mission analysis activities. Back to Spain in 2000, was co-founder of DEIMOS Space in 2001 where he has been involved in or managed many ESA projects, many of them related to interplanetary missions and NEO missions as BepiColombo, ExoMars, Don Quijote, A-Track, Proba-IP, SysNova/MOSAIC, SysNova/KABOOM, SSA-SN-VII, etc, and leads DEIMOS contribution to the FP7 projects NEOShield and Stardust. He is currently Head of the Mission Analysis and Navigation Division at ELECNOR DEIMOS.

 

Orbital dynamics about small bodies
Space missions to minor bodies have represented a limited field of exploration in the recent past (e.g. Giotto, NEAR, Hayabusa, Deep Impact and Rosetta), however represent a very promising field of research and space application in the future particularly after NASA's proposal to bring a small asteroid to Earth's vicinity in the next years. At ESA, a number of missions have been and are under different degrees of development as Rosetta (bound to arrive to its target in 2014), Marco Polo-R (in assessment phase), Proba-IP (phase 0 study in 2009) and the first planetary defense mission proposed in Europe, Don Quijote. In all the cases where the spacecraft is planned to rendezvous with its target the mission designers have to confront an orbital environment which is quite remarkable: a very faint and irregular gravity field, complex rotation states of the minor body, other small forces, etc, and in general, the need to consider complex non-keplerian motions about the body. In this lecture we will analyse the space environment about minor bodies, the orbital dynamical solutions, the stable orbits about minor bodies and also present a summary of missions to the asteroids.

 

Relevant publications
J.L. Cano, M. Sánchez, et al., “A-Track a Mission to Tag Asteroid Apophis”, 5th Conference on New Trends in Astrodynamics and Applications, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy, June 2008,http://www.astrodynamics.eu/Astrodynamics.eu/AstroconV_Talks_files/Sanchez-AstroconV.pdf
G. Bellei, J.L. Cano, M. Sánchez, "Operational Orbiting Strategies About Minor Bodies", 21st International Symposium on Space Flight Dynamics, Toulouse, France, September-October 2009, http://issfd.org/ISSFD_2009/InterMissionDesignI/Cano.pdf
J.L. Cano, et al., “An ESA NEO Technology Demonstration Mission: PROBA-IP” (IAC-09-A3.5.09), 60th International Astronautical Congress, Daewon, South Korea, October 2009, http://www.iafastro.net/iac/archive/browse/IAC-09/B4/2/4668/

 
 
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