You are invited to participate in the ESA Workshop on Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC) for small body missions, which is organized by the European Space Agency (ESA). The workshop is held at ESTEC – the European Space Research and Technology Centre of ESA on 14-15 of January 2009. The participation of most European space industries and other space agencies is already anticipated.

A number of missions to the small bodies of the solar system have flown or are foreseen in order to better understand the origin of the solar system. The ESA Rosetta mission is on its way to the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko while the JAXA Hayabusa mission is on its way back from the asteroid Itokawa hopefully bringing back a few samples from its surface. In the frame of the Cosmic Vision programme of the Science and Robotic Exploration Directorate, the "Marco Polo" medium-class mission was selected and is currently undergoing an assessment phase in competition with other missions. Its aim is to bring back some samples from a very primitive body which belongs to the Near-Earth-Asteroid population. More information on the Marco Polo mission and the Cosmic Vision programme can be found at the Marco Polo website and the Cosmic Vision programme.

In order to do that a spacecraft will have to map the asteroid possibly from an asteroid-bounded orbit, then carefully descent and land, hover or touchdown on its hazardous surface to collect some material at various pre-selected sampling sites. The Guidance, Navigation and Control technologies of the spacecraft are keys to the success of these delicate and critical operations.

This workshop has the objective of gathering world-wide experts in all GNC-related disciplines to discuss and establish what the most feasible strategies are, based on the results from past small body missions, ongoing missions and studies, research work, hardware development, etc.