Integrated Performance of an Autonomous Optical Navigation System for Space Exploration

Abstract

y-bys that occur when the Sun is between the Earth and the planet. Autonomous navigation may also help reduce the tracking demands on ground based infrastructure. Optical navigation techniques are proposed as a solution to the problem of navigating independent of ground based tracking or state updates. In this paper, a new autonomous optical navigation system designed specically for spacecraft operating in a planetary system is presented. The paper briey highlights the image processing algorithm used to extract navigation measurements from a raw image. The primary measurements obtained from this process are a line-of-sight to the planet’s centroid, an estimate of the planet’s apparent diameter, and angular measurements between the planet horizon and reference stars. This paper, however, focuses more on ltering