An Imaging Technique for Safe Spacecraft Landing and Autonomous Hazard Avoidance

©2006 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.Presented at SMC-IT 2006, 2nd IEEE International Space Mission Challenges for Information Technology,17-20 July 2006, Pasadena, California.DOI: 10.1109/SMC-IT.2006.15The focus of this paper is to present an image transformation algorithm to interpret historical imagery land data for autonomous safe landing of a robotic spacecraft. Inherent geographical hazards of Martian terrain may impede safe landing for a science exploration spacecraft. Surface visualization software for hazard detection and avoidance may therefore be applied to enable an autonomous and intelligent spacecraft descent upon entering the planetary atmosphere. The methodology proposed involves integrating linear algebra and computer vision/graphics techniques, with the intrinsic parameters governing spacecraft dynamic motion and camera calibration, in order to assess hazards that might impede spacecraft landing. In this paper, we provide algorithmic details and simulation results of our methodology applied to a representative Mars landing descent profile