Comparison of Orion Vision Navigation Sensor Performance from STS-134 and the Space Operations Simulation Center

Abstract

The Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle is a new spacecraft being designed by NASA and Lockheed Martin for future crewed exploration missions. The Vision Navigation Sensor is a Flash LIDAR that will be the primary relative navigation sensor for this vehicle. To obtain a better understanding of this sensor's performance, the Orion relative navigation team has performed both flight tests and ground tests. This paper summarizes and compares the performance results from the STS-134 flight test, called the Sensor Test for Orion RelNav Risk Mitigation (STORRM) Development Test Objective, and the ground tests at the Space Operations Simulation Center.

Pose Measurement Performance of the Argon Relative Navigation Sensor Suite in Simulated-Flight Conditions

“…The observed retroreflector locations are then compared to an onboard catalog to generate a 6-DOF pose measurement. 9 The VNS manufacturer optimized the VNS design to work in this cooperative environment which is significantly different than the non-cooperative, feature-tracking environment. One benefit of the synthetic imagery tool described above is that, for specified FPose performance goal, it can generate hard requirements on image data statistics that can be easily tested against for any future LIDAR provider.…”

Glidar: An OpenGL-based, Real-Time, and Open Source 3D Sensor Simulator for Testing Computer Vision Algorithms

“…Fourth, hardware-based tests are ill-suited for supporting large statistical analyses of algorithm performance, such as in Monte Carlo analyses [13]. Fifth, and finally, some scenarios are extremely difficult to test in the laboratory environment-especially those involving space applications where the scale, lighting, dynamics, and scene surroundings are challenging (and expensive) to accurately emulate on Earth [14][15][16].…”