Milestone in Space Autonomy: KinetX Validates Optical Nav System on LunaH-Map
LunaH-Map’s star tracker image of the constellation Auriga in false color and increased contrast, with markers indicating the stars chosen by the spacecraft’s autonomous navigation software for attitude determination. Green crosses indicate the star locations predicted by the software and red crosses indicate their actual observed locations in the image. Image Credit: NASA/ASU/KinetX
Today, KinetX successfully exercised its autonomous optical navigation software suite on-board NASA's LunaH-Map spacecraft, using stellar and planetary images acquired by the spacecraft's star tracker camera. The test demonstrated that the navigation process could autonomously correct raw images on-board, estimate the inertial camera orientation using visible stars, compute the astrometric centers of planetary targets in the field, and compute offsets relative to the spacecraft state. Each of these measurements are critical to performing autonomous navigation using on-board images, without intervention from ground assets. This demonstration verifies KinetX' ability to develop and operate flight optical navigation software on-board interplanetary spacecraft and represents a major achievement in KinetX' pursuit to extend the capabilities of autonomous deep space navigation systems.
More details about the technology demonstration can be found on NASA’s blog post here.
