Physically-Realizable Adversarial Attack against Spacecraft Pose Estimation via Active Optical Jamming

Vision-based spacecraft pose estimation is the cornerstone of autonomous on-orbit servicing and non-cooperative rendezvous. Currently, Hybrid Modular Pose Estimation (HMPE) pipelines remain the industry standard for these safety-critical missions due to their interpretability. However, these systems fundamentally rely on the axiom that high-contrast image features correspond to static, rigid geometric structures. We illustrate that this assumption can be physically violated on spacecraft platforms via Physically-Realizable Active Geometric Jamming. We propose an adversarial strategy where the target spacecraft employs onboard steerable spotlights to project beams onto its own planar surfaces, such as solar arrays. These projections create artificial high-contrast features that lack consistent 3D geometric causality, acting as high-confidence outliers that overwhelm the rejection capabilities of RANSAC. To identify effective illumination configurations within the non-differentiable and periodic parameter space, we formulate the attack as a zeroth-order optimization problem. We propose a Topology-Aware CMA-ES that explicitly handles the cyclic nature of angular search spaces, initialized via a Spatially-Structured Adversarial Atlas. Simulation results, conducted in a high-fidelity space environment incorporating HDR rendering and optical bloom artifacts, confirm that this approach systematically degrades the inlier ratio of standard HMPE pipelines, exposing a critical vulnerability in vision-based spacecraft navigation.