## 1 Introduction  
Besides the Sun, the major planets, and their moons, our Solar System comprises numerous smaller bodies (asteroids, comets, and dust particles) collectively known as Small Solar System Bodies (SSSB), also known as the Minor Planets (MP). These small bodies are remnants from the birth of the Solar System and offer valuable insights into planetary formation and the origins of life [1].  
An MP is called a Near-Earth Object (NEO) if its orbit has perihelium less than 1.3 astronomical units (au) and aphelium greater then 0.983 au. According to [2], there is an estimated steady-state population of 10\({}^{4}\) objects with a diameter of the order of 100 m inside the orbit of Neptune (30 au from the Sun) and [3] reports that the Main Asteroid Belt (MAB), between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, might contain up to 2 Mi bodies with more than 1 km diameter. Lunar cratering data suggests that the NEO population, from dust-sized objects to bodies tens of kilometers in size, has been in steady state for the last 3 G.y. [4] and, according to [5], around 1.2 Mi MPs were discovered by September 2022 (\(\sim\)10,000 of them only in 2022), from which 853 NEAs and 152 PHAs were greater than 1 km in diameter.  
Rendezvous missions to NEOs may then grant access to pristine (primitive, unweathered, unaltered) samples directly on the target body, meaning that samples were not affected by interactions with Earth's ambient surroundings, as happens to samples obtained from meteoritic material, thus allowing the collection of accurate information on NEO formation and composition [6; 7; 8]. This has paved the way for planetary Sample Return Missions (SRM) [9; 10; 11; 12; 13; 14; 15], and made rendezvous missions targeting NEOs a multipurpose endeavor, ranging from the scientific goals of understanding the formation and evolution of our Solar System [16; 17; 18; 19] to planetary defense [20; 21; 22; 23; 24; 25; 26; 27; 28] and the potential economic value of space resource assessment and exploration of important mining sources of raw materials (metals and volatiles, including water), potentially useful resources for infrastructure constructions, propellant production, and life support for either cis-lunar or deep-space exploration missions [6; 8; 13; 23; 29; 30; 31; 32], as is the case of the large MAB asteroid (16) Psyche, the M-class (metallic) target of the NASA Psyche spacecraft [19; 33], launched on 13 October 2023 and aiming to approach this asteroid by the beginning of 2029.  
Besides the science and technology demands, an additional remarkable benefit favoring rendezvous missions targeting NEOs comes from the fact that, for around 20% of these bodies that periodically approach Earth's orbit, the velocity impulse \(\Delta v\sim\) 6 km/s required to transfer and insert a spacecraft into an orbit around them is lower than that required for orbiting our Moon [34], and lower than the \(\Delta v\sim\) 8 km/s required to reach around 4000 MBA bodies [35].  
Nonetheless, uncertainties arising from a lack of a priori knowledge about these bodies make it challenging to design rendezvous missions aimed at reconnaissance and exploration of NEOs, particularly regarding touch-and-go, descent, or sampling operations, as the spacecraft's motion in these faint force fields may be easily disturbed by the bodies' shape/mass asymmetries and by external forces, directly affecting the dynamics and control of orbits around them [36; 37], which may lead to collisions with the body or escape from its neighborhood [38]. To easily implement orbit control in these highly nonlinear environments, we will use the suboptimal State-Dependent Riccati Equation (SDRE) control technique, which is based on representing an input affine (linear in control) nonlinear model to resemble a linear structure by adopting state-dependent coefficient (SDC) matrices, in a process called pseudolinearization or extended linearization [39]. This pseudolinear design allows the flexibility of LQR formulation to be directly translated to control nonlinear systems.