Related papers: AI-Enabled Crater-Based Navigation for Lunar Mappi…
The Lunar landing has drawn great interest in lunar exploration in recent years, and autonomous lunar landing navigation is fundamental to this task. AI is expected to play a critical role in autonomous and intelligent space missions, yet…
Terrain relative navigation can improve the precision of a spacecraft's position estimate by detecting global features that act as supplementary measurements to correct for drift in the inertial navigation system. This paper presents a…
Crater counting on the Moon and other bodies is crucial to constrain the dynamical history of the Solar System. This has traditionally been done by visual inspection of images, thus limiting the scope, efficiency, and/or accuracy of…
As space missions aim to explore increasingly hazardous terrain, accurate and timely position estimates are required to ensure safe navigation. Vision-based navigation achieves this goal through correlating impact craters visible through…
The European Space Agency (ESA), driven by its ambitions on planned lunar missions with the Argonaut lander, has a profound interest in reliable crater detection, since craters pose a risk to safe lunar landings. This task is usually…
This paper shows the application of autonomous Crater Detection using the U-Net, a Fully-Convolutional Neural Network, on Ceres. The U-Net is trained on optical images of the Moon Global Morphology Mosaic based on data collected by the LRO…
Craters are one of the most studied planetary features used for different scientific analyses, such as estimation of surface age and surface processes. Satellite images utilized for crater detection often have low resolution (LR) due to…
In order to make a pinpoint landing on the Moon, the spacecraft's navigation system must be accurate. To achieve the desired accuracy, navigational drift caused by the inertial sensors must be corrected. One way to correct this drift is to…
To address the need for robust positioning, navigation, and timing services in lunar environments, this paper proposes a novel fault detection framework for satellite constellations using inter-satellite ranging (ISR). Traditionally,…
Impact craters are formed as a result of continuous impacts on the surface of planetary bodies. This paper proposes a novel way of simultaneously utilizing optical images, digital elevation maps (DEMs), and slope maps for automatic crater…
It is often necessary to identify a pattern of observed craters in a single image of the lunar surface and without any prior knowledge of the camera's location. This so-called "lost-in-space" crater identification problem is common in both…
We present a modular, full-stack autonomy system for lunar surface navigation and mapping developed for the Lunar Autonomy Challenge. Operating in a GNSS-denied, visually challenging environment, our pipeline integrates semantic…
The traditional celestial navigation system (CNS) is used the moon, stars, and planets as celestial guides. Then the star tracker (i.e. track one star or planet or angle between it) and star sensor (i.e. sense many star simultaneous) be…
The Artemis program requires robotic and crewed lunar rovers for resource prospecting and exploitation, construction and maintenance of facilities, and human exploration. These rovers must support navigation for 10s of kilometers (km) from…
Crater ellipticity determination is a complex and time consuming task that so far has evaded successful automation. We train a state of the art computer vision algorithm to identify craters in Lunar digital elevation maps and retrieve their…
This paper reviews improved calibration methods for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Lunar Exploration Neutron Detector. We cross calibrated the set of LEND observations and models of its detectors physical geometry and composition against…
Optical navigation is a critical component for lunar orbiter and lander missions. Image-based crater identification has emerged as a promising technology for optical navigation due to the abundance of craters on the lunar surface and the…
Impact craters are among the most prominent geomorphological features on planetary surfaces and are of substantial significance in planetary science research. Their spatial distribution and morphological characteristics provide critical…
The CosmoQuest virtual community science platform facilitates the creation and implementation of astronomical research projects performed by citizen scientists. One such project, called Moon Mappers, aids in determining the feasibility of…
NASA aims to establish a sustainable human basecamp on the Moon as a stepping stone for future missions to Mars and beyond. The discovery of water ice on the Moon's craters located in permanently shadowed regions, which can provide drinking…