Navigation for Planetary Approach and Landing

Abstract

Autonomous navigation is a key enabling technology for future planetary exploration mission. For planetary Landers, vision based navigation concepts, working on complex, unstructured scenes, appear as the most promising while in the same time the most challenging technology. Working on concepts previously proposed for lunar landers, the “Navigation for Planetary Approach and Landing” (or NPAL in the following) ESA study goes one step further in securing two critical components of a vision navigation concept. First the on-line processing of the video stream for extracting the necessary observable for the navigation filtering is designed and an implementation on a dedicated integrated circuit –the FEICis realised. Second the camera itself is bread boarded to support the end-toend demonstration. The study accompanies the system design effort to propose a Lander in the European initiative for Mercury exploration, the BepiColombo project. This paper introduces the context and the objective of the study, the industrial organisation, and present work progress at mid-course. A key achievement is in the selection and definition of the algorithms to be implemented in the FEIC.