Related papers: AI-Enabled Crater-Based Navigation for Lunar Mappi…
The past decade has witnessed a growing interest in lunar exploration missions. The autonomy of lunar surface and in-orbit missions is, however, dependent on accurate and instantaneous navigation services. These services can not be provided…
Crater cataloging is an important yet time-consuming part of geological mapping. We present an automated Crater Detection Algorithm (CDA) that is competitive with expert-human researchers and hundreds of times faster. The CDA uses multiple…
We introduce CREStE, a scalable learning-based mapless navigation framework to address the open-world generalization and robustness challenges of outdoor urban navigation. Key to achieving this is learning perceptual representations that…
The resurgence of lunar operations requires advancements in cislunar navigation and Space Situational Awareness (SSA). Challenges associated to these tasks have created an interest in autonomous planning, navigation, and tracking…
The increasing importance of Vision-Based Navigation (VBN) algorithms in space missions raises numerous challenges in ensuring their reliability and operational robustness. Sensor faults can lead to inaccurate outputs from navigation…
Accurate estimation of cratering asymmetry on the Moon is crucial for understanding Moon evolution history. Early studies of cratering asymmetry have omitted the contributions of high lunar obliquity and inclination. Here, we include lunar…
We investigate the use of a point cloud measurement in terrain-aided navigation. Our goal is to aid an inertial navigation system, by exploring ways to generate a useful measurement innovation error for effective nonlinear state estimation.…
With the complexity of lunar exploration missions, the moon needs to have a higher level of autonomy. Environmental perception and navigation algorithms are the foundation for lunar rovers to achieve autonomous exploration. The development…
Autonomous precision navigation to land onto the Moon relies on vision sensors. Computer vision algorithms are designed, trained and tested using synthetic simulations. High quality terrain models have been produced by Moon orbiters…
Craters are one of the most prominent features on planetary surfaces, used in applications such as age estimation, hazard detection, and spacecraft navigation. Crater detection is a challenging problem due to various aspects, including…
There has been an increase in interest in missions that drive significantly longer distances per day than what has currently been performed. Further, some of these proposed missions require autonomous driving and absolute localization in…
Despite widespread adoption of deep learning models to address a variety of computer vision tasks, planetary science has yet to see extensive utilization of such tools to address its unique problems. On Titan, the largest moon of Saturn,…
The BRITE mission is a pioneering space project aimed at the long-term photometric monitoring of the brightest stars in the sky by means of a constellation of nano-satellites. Its main advantage is high photometric accuracy and time…
Lunar Laser Ranging (LLR) measurements are crucial for advanced exploration of the laws of fundamental gravitational physics and geophysics. Current LLR technology allows us to measure distances to the Moon with a precision approaching 1…
Event-based cameras (EBCs) are a promising new technology for star tracking-based attitude determination, but prior studies have struggled to determine accurate ground truth for real data. We analyze the accuracy of an EBC star tracking…
We develop an integrated guidance and control system that in conjunction with a stabilized seeker and landing site detection software can achieve precise and safe planetary landing. The seeker tracks the designated landing site by adjusting…
We present a novel pipeline that uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) to improve the detection capability of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) in the context of planetary defense. Our work aims to minimize the dependency on human…
The NASA Dawn spacecraft acquired thousands of images of asteroid Vesta during its year-long orbital tour, and is now on its way to asteroid Ceres. A method for calibrating images acquired by the onboard Framing Camera was described by…
The use of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) to increase spacecraft autonomy for orbit determination has gained renewed momentum following the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE), which demonstrated feasible onboard GPS and…
The Lunar CRater Observations and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission impacted a spent Centaur rocket stage into a permanently shadowed region near the lunar south pole. The Sheperding Spacecraft (SSC) separated \sim9 hours before impact and…