Related papers: Precision Mars Entry Navigation with Atmospheric D…
For the past several decades, numerous attempts have been made to model the climate of Mars with extensive studies focusing on the planet's dynamics and the understanding of its climate. While physical modeling and data assimilation…
This work presents a deep-learning approach to estimate atmospheric density profiles for use in planetary entry guidance problems. A long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network is trained to learn the mapping between measurements available…
In this paper, emerging deep learning techniques are leveraged to deal with Mars visual navigation problem. Specifically, to achieve precise landing and autonomous navigation, a novel deep neural network architecture with double branches…
This paper presented a robust integrated navigation algorithm based on a special robust desensitized extended Kalman filtering with analytical gain (ADEKF) during the Mars atmospheric entry. The robust ADEKF is designed by minimizing a new…
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…
In this paper, closed-loop entry guidance in a randomly perturbed atmosphere, using bank angle control, is posed as a stochastic optimal control problem. The entry trajectory, as well as the closed-loop controls, are both modeled as random…
Mars is the next milestone in human exploration. However, there are still several challenges that must be assessed to ensure appropriate conditions in a future settlement. Communications services will be essential for this task, providing…
The availability of Martian atmospheric data provided by several Martian missions broadened the opportunity to investigate and study the conditions of the Martian ionosphere. As such, ionospheric models play a crucial part in improving our…
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,…
Aerocapture uses atmospheric drag to decelerate spacecraft and achieve orbit insertion. One of the significant risks associated with aerocapture is the uncertainty in the atmospheric density, particularly for outer planets. The paper…
Autonomous terrain classification is an important problem in planetary navigation, whether the goal is to identify scientific sites of interest or to traverse treacherous areas safely. Past Martian rovers have relied on human operators to…
Airborne dust plays an active role in determining the thermal structure and chemical composition of the present-day atmosphere of Mars and possibly the planet's climate evolution over time through radiative--convective and cloud…
Depth estimation plays a great potential role in obstacle avoidance and navigation for further Mars exploration missions. Compared to traditional stereo matching, learning-based stereo depth estimation provides a data-driven approach to…
Risk to human astronauts and interplanetary distance causing slow and limited communication drives scientists to pursue an autonomous approach to exploring distant planets, such as Mars. A portion of exploration of Mars has been conducted…
Future Mars missions will require advanced guidance, navigation, and control algorithms for the powered descent phase to target specific surface locations and achieve pinpoint accuracy (landing error ellipse $<$ 5 m radius). The latter…
This paper proposes a novel adaptive guidance system developed using reinforcement meta-learning with a recurrent policy and value function approximator. The use of recurrent network layers allows the deployed policy to adapt real time to…
Traversability assessment of deformable terrain is vital for safe rover navigation on planetary surfaces. Machine learning (ML) is a powerful tool for traversability prediction but faces predictive uncertainty. This uncertainty leads to…
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…
The question of how "smart" active agents, like insects, microorganisms, or future colloidal robots need to steer to optimally reach or discover a target, such as an odor source, food, or a cancer cell in a complex environment has recently…
The atmosphere is chaotic. This fundamental property of the climate system makes forecasting weather incredibly challenging: it's impossible to expect weather models to ever provide perfect predictions of the Earth system beyond timescales…