Descent image based landing area terrain reconstruction technology for lunar landing mission

Abstract

In this paper, we present a descent image based extraterrestrial terrain reconstruction technology, which has been successfully applied in China's first soft landing Chang'E-3 mission on moon. When scouting on the moon surface, the lunar rover (Jade Rabbit rover) requires reliable terrain information for navigation and positioning tasks. The descent image sequence acts as a link between the orbital images and the surface images. The proposed approach collects multilevel descent images, as well as inertial information from an inertial measurement unit and surface stereo vision information, to generalise a consistent surface model. A data fusion strategy is proposed to track the camera trajectory, and refined plane sweep stereo matching and 3D alignment technologies are analysed in this article. The onboard result, as well as on-earth simulation experiments, has shown that the discussed techniques are reliable to reconstruct the terrain information for the lunar rover's localisation and navigation.

Keywords:

• Descent images
• Data fusion
• Plane sweep
• 3D alignment

Acknowledgements

This work is supported in part by China Academy of Space Technology.