A novel autonomous navigation technique using pictures in support of a circumlunar mission: Development testing aboard the ISS

Abstract

Natural growth of spaceflight involves exploration of the Solar system. The Moon is the first space body to be explored by the terrestrial civilization, and the 21st century may see the beginning of a geopolitical competition for the natural resources of the Moon. Implementation of the lunar exploration program will provide a stepping stone to deep space exploration, development of a circumlunar infrastructure, starting manned missions to the lunar surface and, in the long run, establishing an outpost on the lunar surface in the interests of the Russian program of fundamental and applied space research, as well as future manned missions to Mars and other bodies of the Solar system. In order to successfully accomplish a manned mission to the Moon, a number of engineering problems need to be solved, one of which is autonomous navigation in circumlunar flight. Up to a certain distance of the spacecraft (SC) from Earth the orbital parameters and corrective burns can be generated from data received from the ground tracking system. In addition to it, data from the onboard satellite navigation equipment can be used. However, in the vicinity of the Moon and during the time when the Moon blocks the view of Earth from the SC, corrective burns need to be generated with inputs from autonomous navigation measurements. Such measurements are usually taken with special optical instruments and sensors, which are used to determine directions towards selected stars, as well as the positions of the Moon, Earth and the Sun. It is also possible to use pictures of the planet to determine the SC orbital parameters. Moreover, the current state of the art of the professional digital photographic equipment makes it possible for the crew to use for autonomous navigation measurement not only special photographic equipment, but also common (off-the-shelf) still camera, just by taking hand-held shots of the sunlit lunar surface through a window. Pictures of the lunar surface taken with a digital camera can then be transferred by the crew to an onboard laptop computer and subjected to any transformations, including those that allow determining the survey point, that is, the spatial position of the camera at the moment when the picture was taken. If need be, these data, which have been independently computed by the crew, can then be entered into the control system. In addition to the existing navigation methods, such lunar photography can be used, for example, to set up a backup, monitoring or emergency autonomous navigation system. The paper proposes a technique for determining the SC position using pictures of the planetary surface. It discusses the experience of development testing of the proposed technique and cites examples of using the technique as applied to the images taken by the ISS cosmonauts within the framework of experiments “Uragan”, “Vizir”, “Vector-T”. The feasibility of using this technique in circumlunar flight is illustrated by the processing of pictures taken by Apollo astronauts through the window of the lunar orbital module.