Engineers must outfit spacecraft with tools that let them “see” where they are and go to where they need to be in order for future lunar exploration missions to be successful and land more precisely. It is not easy to locate precise areas among the moon’s complex landscape.
A diverse team of engineers recently demonstrated how a series of lunar photos can be used to deduce the direction that a spacecraft is going in research that was recently published in the AIAA Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets.
This method, also known as visual odometry, enables navigational data to be acquired even in the absence of a reliable map. The objective is to eliminate the need for a detailed map of the moon’s surface, enabling spacecraft to target and land more precisely.
“The issue is really precision landing,” said John Christian, an associate professor of aerospace engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and first author on the paper. “There’s been a big drive to make the landing footprint smaller so we can go closer to places of either scientific interest or interest for future human exploration.”
Researchers from Utah State University and Intuitive Machines, LLC (IM) in Houston, Texas collaborated with Christian on this study. IM has received numerous work orders from NASA as part of the organization’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative.
A spacecraft is a machine or craft made for space travel. a spacecraft is a vehicle that can fly in a controlled manner above Earth’s lower atmosphere with or without a crew.
I will deliver six CLPS payloads and six commercial payloads to Oceanus Procellarum by IM’s first mission, IM-1, in the fourth quarter of 2021. In the fourth quarter of 2022, their IM-2 commercial mission will deliver a NASA drill and other cargo to the lunar south pole.
The interdisciplinary industry/academia team follows in the footsteps of the NASA Autonomous Hazard Avoidance and Landing Technology (ALHAT) project which was a groundbreaking multi-center NASA/industry/academia effort for precision landing.
Timothy Crain
Although early designs for space travel frequently featured streamlined spacecraft, there is no special advantage to streamlining in the vacuum of space. Depending on the task, different shapes are used in actual vehicles.
Communications, earth observation, meteorology, navigation, planetary exploration, and space tourism are just a few of the uses for which spacecraft are utilized. Humans are present on board human spacecraft either as crew or passengers. Robotic spacecraft are either autonomous or telerobotic in their operation.
“The interdisciplinary industry/academia team follows in the footsteps of the NASA Autonomous Hazard Avoidance and Landing Technology (ALHAT) project which was a groundbreaking multi-center NASA/industry/academia effort for precision landing,” said Timothy Crain, the Vice President of Research and Development at IM.
“Using the ALHAT paradigm and technologies as a starting point, we identified a map-free visual odometry technology as being a game-changer for safe and affordable precision landing.”
In this study, the researchers illustrated how they can infer a spacecraft’s direction of motion from a series of photographs.
These direction-of-motion measurements, along with data from other spacecraft sensors and knowledge about the orientation of the moon, can be incorporated into a number of mathematical connections to aid in the navigation of the spacecraft.
“This is information that we can feed into a computer, again in concert with other measurements, that all gets put together in a way that tells the spacecraft where it is, where’s it’s going, how fast it’s going, and what direction it’s pointed,” Christian said.
