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Multiple importance sampling (MIS) is an indispensable tool in rendering that constructs robust sampling strategies by combining the respective strengths of individual distributions. Its efficiency can be greatly improved by carefully…
The visual detection and tracking of surface terrain is required for spacecraft to safely land on or navigate within close proximity to celestial objects. Current approaches rely on template matching with pre-gathered patch-based features,…
Extraterrestrial rovers with a general-purpose robotic arm have many potential applications in lunar and planetary exploration. Introducing autonomy into such systems is desirable for increasing the time that rovers can spend gathering…
Radio maps reflect the spatial distribution of signal strength and are essential for applications like smart cities, IoT, and wireless network planning. However, reconstructing accurate radio maps from sparse measurements remains…
Autonomous vehicles such as the Mars rovers currently lead the vanguard of surface exploration on extraterrestrial planets and moons. In order to accelerate the pace of exploration and science objectives, it is critical to plan safe and…
The next great leap in Martian exploration will be the return of samples to Earth. To ensure the maximum scientific return from studying these samples, the development and utilisation of nondestructive analytical techniques are essential to…
Combining multi-spectral satellite data and machine learning has been suggested as a method for monitoring plastic pollutants in the ocean environment. Recent studies have made theoretical progress regarding the identification of marine…
Ballistic capture orbits offer safer Mars injection at longer transfer time. However, the search for such an extremely rare event is a computationally intensive process. Indeed, it requires the propagation of a grid sampling the whole…
Soil assessment is important for mobile robot planning and navigation on natural and planetary environments. Terramechanic characteristics can be inferred from the thermal behaviour of soils under the influence of sunlight using remote…
We address the problem of vehicle self-localization from multi-modal sensor information and a reference map. The map is generated off-line by extracting landmarks from the vehicle's field of view, while the measurements are collected…
We advocate for the realization of volatile sample return from various destinations including: small bodies, the Moon, Mars, ocean worlds/satellites, and plumes. As part of recent mission studies (e.g., Comet Astrobiology Exploration SAmple…
For over a decade, scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have been recording measurements from the Martian surface as a part of the Mars Exploration Rovers mission. One quantity of interest has been the opacity of Mars's…
Performing orbital insertion around Mars using aerocapture instead of a propulsive orbit insertion manoeuvre allows to save resources and/or increase the payload mass fraction. Aerocapture has never been employed to date because of the high…
In the era of exploding survey volumes, traditional methods of spectroscopic analysis are being pushed to their limits. In response, we develop deep-REMAP, a novel deep learning framework that utilizes a regularized, multi-task approach to…
Earth observing satellites are powerful tools for collecting scientific information about our planet, however they have limitations: they cannot easily deviate from their orbital trajectories, their sensors have a limited field of view, and…
The global demand for medicinal plants, such as Damask roses, has surged with population growth, yet labor-intensive harvesting remains a bottleneck for scalability. To address this, we propose a novel 3D perception pipeline tailored for…
On-orbit proximity operations in space rendezvous, docking and debris removal require precise and robust 6D pose estimation under a wide range of lighting conditions and against highly textured background, i.e., the Earth. This paper…
Seismic measurements are an important tool for exploration of planetary interiors, but may not be included in missions due to perceived complexity in placement of sensitive instruments on the surface. To help address this concern, we assess…
Endurance is a mission concept to explore and ultimately return samples from the Moon's largest and oldest impact basin, South Pole-Aitken (SPA). SPA holds the answers to many outstanding planetary science questions, including the earliest…
Many remote sensing applications employ masking of pixels in satellite imagery for subsequent measurements. For example, estimating water quality variables, such as Suspended Sediment Concentration (SSC) requires isolating pixels depicting…