Since 2010 the German Aerospace Center (DLR) is working on the project ATON (Autonomous Terrain-based Optical Navigation). Its objective is the development of technologies which allow autonomous navigation of spacecraft in orbit around and during landing on celestial bodies like the Moon, planets, asteroids and comets. The project developed different image processing techniques and optical navigation methods as well as sensor data fusion. The setup-which is applicable to many exploration missions-consists of an inertial measurement unit (IMU), a laser altimeter, a star tracker and one or multiple navigation cameras. In the past years, several milestones have been achieved. It started with the setup of a simulation environment including the detailed simulation of camera images. This was continued by hardware-in-the-loop tests in the Testbed for Robotic Optical Navigation where images were generated by real cameras in a simulated downscaled lunar landing scene. Data was recorded

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In this work a calibration method which is easy to use and is capable of calibrating a combination of a magnetometer and an accelerometer is described. The calibration method accounts for hard and soft iron effects created by the platform, sensor errors like biases, scale factors and non-orthogonalities as well as the relative orientation between the magnetometer and the accelerometer. The algorithm is based on a least squares problem, which is solved using a singular value decomposition. During the calibration process the spatial orientation of the platform is not needed. Therefore no additional hardware is required. The functionality and accuracy of the algorithm is shown using simulated sensor readings

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