CASTOR aims to develop autonomous guidance and control algorithms for CubeSats in the vicinity of small bodies, such as asteroids, employing low-power, high-performance computing boards. The project foresees collaboration with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the GNC section at ESA.

At Polimi, the development of CASTOR will be carried out at the DART Lab, the laboratory managed by Prof. Francesco Topputo where guidance and navigation algorithms for space satellites are experimented with integrated hardware-in-the-loop simulations, exploiting the facilities of Prof. Topputo’s ERC project EXTREMA for testing and validation purposes.