Tail-Risk-Aware Information Guidance for Angles-Only Spacecraft Rendezvous Under Markovian Measurement Outages

Summary

A single-author preprint proposes CVaR-based (tail-risk-aware) guidance for angle-only spacecraft rendezvous under burst-correlated optical measurement dropouts. The approach was validated through 10,000 planar and 200 nonlinear 3D simulations.

Why it matters

Autonomous proximity operations are increasingly relying solely on angle-based sensing. The usability of these measurements is geometry-dependent and susceptible to correlated dropouts. Shaping guidance design to manage the tail of the navigation uncertainty distribution, rather than just expected performance, is a practically significant shift for robust rendezvous in LEO and beyond.

Highlights

• A 35.8% increase in maneuver cost yields a 39.2% reduction at 95% CVaR and a 15.7% reduction at 99% CVaR
• 3D capture set: Realized measurement usability rises from 20.7% to 56.1%; median terminal error drops from ~50 m to ~0.9 m
• The author frames the benefit as navigation robustness rather than superior terminal accuracy, noting that corridor constraints are monitored but not enforced

Critical take

The work is a single-author preprint that has not undergone peer review. The author acknowledges that the approach only monitors, rather than enforces, corridor safety constraints. Consequently, the guidance is not yet a safety-compliant solution for proximity operations. Additionally, all evidence relies on simulation comparisons (10,000 planar, 200 3D runs). Since no hardware-in-the-loop or flight validation is provided, claims of operational readiness are limited.