The selection of Gale crater as the Mars Science Laboratory landing site took over five
years, involved broad participation of the science community via five open workshops, and …

Images are an important source of information for spacecraft navigation and for three-
dimensional (3-D) reconstruction of observed space objects. Both of these applications take …

In this paper, we present the vision-aided inertial navigation (VISINAV) algorithm that
enables precision planetary landing. The vision front-end of the VISINAV system extracts 2 …

Increasing the level of spacecraft autonomy is essential for broadening the reach of solar
system exploration. Computer vision has and will continue to play an important role in …

The driving precision landing requirement for the Autonomous Landing and Hazard
Avoidance Technology project is to autonomously land within 100 m of a predetermined …

In this paper we describe an extended Kalman filter algorithm for estimating the pose and
velocity of a spacecraft during entry, descent, and landing. The proposed estimator …

The use of images for spacecraft navigation is well established. Although these images have
traditionally been processed by a human analyst on Earth, a variety of recent advancements …

Recent interest in sending humans to the moon, Mars, or other destinations beyond low
Earth orbit has created an increased need for autonomous spacecraft navigation. Because …

An automated crater detection algorithm is presented which exploits image data. The
algorithm is briefly described and its application demonstrated on a variety of different …

Crater recognition on Mars is of paramount importance for many space science applications,
such as accurate planetary surface age dating and geological mapping. Such recognition is …