Ground Beacons to Enhance Lunar Landing Autonomous Navigation Architectures

Abstract

Current and future landing missions are relying on a combination of inertial and optical sensor measurements to accomplish the navigation task. The present thesis work carried out at DLR Institute of Space Systems, is mainly focused on the conceptual definition and analyses of possible configurations for a ground based infrastructure aiding the on-board navigation system in a lunar landing scenario. From aircraft navigation legacy, range, range-rate and bearing measurements from beacons on ground have been devised and fused together with the optical and inertial ones provided by the on-board navigation system: an error state Extended Kalman Filter (eEKF) is used for the scope. Different configurations of this on-ground navigation infrastructures, changing number of beacons and combination of the new measurements have been tested through Monte Carlo analyses; the navigation performance has been evaluated through appropriately defined cost parameters. The results obtained are very good and promising, even in presence of just one beacon placed near the landing site providing range and range-rate. The results open the door to further development of the research in the field of ground-based navigation for planetary landing, quite unexplored at the time being, but very interesting in the light of future extraterrestrial settlements.