Beacons for supporting lunar landing navigation

Abstract

Current and future planetary exploration missions involve a landing on the target celestial body. Almost all of these landing missions are currently relying on a combination of inertial and optical sensor measurements to determine the current flight state with respect to the target body and the desired landing site. As soon as an infrastructure at the landing site exists, the requirements as well as conditions change for vehicles landing close to this existing infrastructure. This paper investigates the options for ground based infrastructure supporting the on-board navigation system and analyzes the impact on the achievable navigation accuracy. For that purpose the paper starts with an existing navigation architecture based on optical navigation and extends it with measurements to support navigation with ground infrastructure. A scenario of lunar landing is simulated and the provided functions of the ground infrastructure as well as the location with respect to the landing site are evaluated. The results are analyzed and discussed. Keywords lunar landing • autonomous navigation • beacon navigation 1 Introduction Since the beginning of human space exploration, safe and soft landing on a celestial body (planet, moon, asteroid) has been a central objective. Starting

Multiple beacons for supporting lunar landing navigation

“…This paper continues the analysis of the impact of radio beacons on the lunar surface which was started in the previous paper [9]. The previous analysis started from a baseline navigation system with current technologies and analysed the improvement of the navigation solution when using a single beacon on ground located close to the landing site.…”

“…For the trade-offs presented in this paper the same definition of an evaluation function is used as defined in [9]. It is based on relevant lunar landing requirements from [4,6,10,2].…”

“…In the previous paper [9] a single beacon close to the landing site was analysed. It was shown that beacon positions can be found where the navigation accuracy requirements can be met with all evaluation function values below 1.0.…”

“…In both plots of figure 8 the position of the beacon is marked with a pink cross. It is the position which was proposed in [9] as the best solution for a single beacon and an intended landing at position (0,0) in the map. The avoidance area for the landing is shown as a pink circle.…”

A Distributed Radio Beacon/IMU/Altimeter Integrated Localization Scheme with Uncertain Initial Beacon Locations for Lunar Pinpoint Landing

“…Several studies regarding the optimization of beacon configurations have been presented, both in terms of the filter accuracy [ 7 , 8 ] and observabilities [ 9 , 10 ]. On this basis, Theil et al from the German Space Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, DLR) investigated the impact of one to four ground beacons for the small integrated navigation for planetary exploration (SINPLEX) project of ESA [ 4 , 11 ]. In this research, bearing measurements, as well as range and range rate measurements, were utilized by the navigation filter to augment the navigation baseline of SINPLEX.…”