GMV has taken on responsibility for designing the Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC) system of the international mission HERACLES, which signifies human return to the moon. The European Space Agency (ESA) is leading this mission, to which also the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) are contributing.

The remit of HERACLES is to try out various technologies to pave the way for the future arrival of astronauts. It will do so by taking a soil-sample-collecting and terrain-exploration rover to the moon plus a spacecraft to bring the samples back to the Lunar Orbital Platform – Gateway.

Photo: ESA

In the HERACLES mission GMV is leading the consortium that is designing the guidance, navigation and control system for the ascent from the moon’s surface, for orbit transfer and for rendezvous and docking with the Gateway. In collaboration with GMV personnel in Portugal and Thales Alenia Space France and Italy, GMV will be developing a trajectory analysis tool for analyzing the transfers from low moon orbit to the NRHO orbits and for the rendezvous in the NRHO orbit. This tool will serve as the basis for the guidance function. GMV will also take on the design and development of the guidance, navigation and control (GNC) system and implementation of onboard algorithms, plus demonstration of a GNC prototype for trialing the technology of this future mission.

At the same time GMV is also responsible for the GNC of the rendezvous and docking phase in one of the system studies, the Thales Italia-led ESA study for designing HERACLES’s rest component.

The HERACLES mission has to meet several concurrent technological challenges such as: to demonstrate human-controlled subsystems, like propulsion, guidance, navigation and control; to test communication technologies and to control the mission from Earth, or from the astronaut-run Lunar Gateway.

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