This paper presents the comprehensive results of landing site topographic mapping and rover localization in Chang'e-3 mission. High-precision topographic products of the landing site with extremely high resolutions (up to 0.05 m) were generated from descent images and registered to CE-2 DOM. Local DEM and DOM with 0.02 m resolution were produced routinely at each waypoint along the rover traverse. The lander location was determined to be (19.51256°W, 44.11884°N, 2615.451 m) using a method of DOM matching. In order to reduce error accumulation caused by wheel slippage and IMU drift in dead reckoning, cross-site visual localization and DOM matching localization methods were developed to localize the rover at waypoints; the overall traveled distance from the lander is 114.8 m from cross-site visual localization and 111.2 m from DOM matching localization. The latter is of highest accuracy and has been verified using a LRO NAC image where the rover trajeactory is directly identifiable. During CE-3 mission operations, landing site mapping and rover localization products including DEMs and DOMs, traverse maps, vertical traverse profiles were generated timely to support teleoperation tasks such as obstacle avoidance and rover path planning. Chang'e-3, Yutu rover, landing site mapping, rover localization, descent camera, navigation camera PACS number(s): 96.20.-n, 91.10.Jf, 91.10.Lh, 91.10.Da Citation: Liu Z Q, Di K C, Peng M, et al. High precision landing site mapping and rover localization for Chang'e-3 mission.

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The panorama cameras onboard the Yutu Rover of the Chang'E‐3 lunar mission acquired hundreds of high‐resolution color images of the lunar surface and captured the first in situ lunar opposition effect (OE) since the Apollo era. We extracted the phase curve and the color ratio in three bands with the phase angle range from 2° to 141°. Photometric inversions using the Hapke model reveal that submicroscopic dusts are present in the landing area and both the coherent backscattering and the shadow hiding are responsible for the strong OE. Compared with spaceborne measurements, the grains in the landing site are brighter, more transparent, and appear to be better crystallized than the average maria basaltic grains. The results show that the phase‐reddening effect appears to be present in the in situ phase curves. The current phase curve can be used as the ground‐truth validations of any future spaceborne phase curve measurement over the landing site region.