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

Abstract

Angles-only spacecraft rendezvous couples guidance and navigation because trajectory geometry changes both observability and measurement availability. This paper develops tail-risk-aware guidance for geometry-dependent, burst-correlated optical outages. A planar benchmark uses explicit Markov measurement-arrival scenarios and conditional value at risk to shape terminal navigation uncertainty, followed by independent 10,000-run validation. Relative to expected availability guidance, the selected trajectory reduces 95% conditional value at risk by 39.2% and 99% conditional value at risk by 15.7%, at 35.8% higher maneuver expenditure. A separate 200-run nonlinear three-dimensional holdout uses two-body-plus-oblateness truth dynamics, azimuth/elevation sensing, maneuver errors, unscented Kalman filtering, and covariance-weighted terminal feedback. The risk-aware trajectory increases realized measurement availability from 20.7% to 56.1%, reduces mean longest outage from 14.39 to 6.80 epochs, and reduces median and 95th-percentile terminal estimation error from 49.64m to 0.89m and 223.24m to 21.93m, respectively, while mission success remains statistically comparable. The demonstrated operational payoff is navigation robustness, not superior terminal accuracy. Because approach-corridor constraints are monitored but not enforced, the study does not establish safety-compliant proximity operations.