Extended Abstract Intelligent Landing Hazard Assessment and Avoidance for Safe Spacecraft Landing

This paper presents a novel multi-sensor information fusion methodology for landing hazard assessment and avoidance. The focus of this research is to analyze hazard characteristics of a planetary surface using imagery data obtained in real-time during spacecraft orbit, descent, or landing. This information is used to enable a spacecraft to safely touchdown on a planetary surface during mission operations. The focus of our approach is on robust terrain analysis in which the terrain is analyzed using multiple sensors and the extracted terrain characteristics are combined to select safe landing sites for touchdown. The novelty of this method is the incorporation of the Terrain-Hazard Map, which represents the risk associated with landing on a planetary surface, and the Fuel Map, which discriminates between landing locations based on spacecraft fuel constraints. The hazard assessment and avoidance algorithm is explained in detail in this paper and computer simulation results are presented.