SmallSat Swarm Gravimetry: Revealing the Interior Structure of Asteroids and Comets

Abstract

A growing database of interesting small bodies motivates research into rapid characterization methods for economic or scientific objectives. The computational tools developed in this work enable reconstruction of internal structure for irregularly shaped celestial bodies, thus aiding target selection and exploration. Simulations of on-orbit data are used to recover the density map of a multi layered polyhedron, and reconstruction accuracies are investigated across multiple scenarios. The presented results and analysis demonstrate successful density recovery of a fully heterogeneous, multilayered asteroid with on-orbit measurements.