Overview of Terrain Relative Navigation Approaches for Precise Lunar Landing
Abstract
The driving precision landing requirement for the Autonomous Landing and Hazard Avoidance Technology project is to autonomously land within 100 m of a predetermined location on the lunar surface. Traditional lunar landing approaches based on inertial sensing do not have the navigational precision to meet this requirement. The purpose of Terrain Relative Navigation (TRN) is to augment inertial navigation by providing position or bearing measurements relative to known surface landmarks. From these measurements, the navigational precision can be reduced to a level that meets the 100 m requirement. There are three different TRN functions: global position estimation, local position estimation and velocity estimation. These functions can be achieved with active range sensing or passive imaging. This paper gives a survey of many TRN approaches and then presents some high fidelity simulation results for contour matching and area correlation approaches to TRN using active sensors. Since TRN requires an a-priori reference map, the paper concludes by describing past and future lunar imaging and digital elevation map data sets available for this purpose.
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[12] incorporated random sample consensus (RANSAC) to check whether the translation vectors between detected craters and known craters were consistent in images where multiple craters were detected; if a crater match produced a translation vector that was an outlier, then that match was rejected.
“This approach incorporated random sample consensus (RANSAC) [13] to check whether the translation vectors between detected craters and known craters were consistent in images where multiple craters were detected.If a crater match produced a translation vector that was an outlier from the other crater matches, then that match was rejected.”
From Lunar Terrain Relative Navigation Using a Convolutional Neural Network for Visual Crater Detection (2020) · cites this paper as [13]
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References 25 · Cited by 169
- Authors
- Johnson, A. E., & Montgomery, J. F.
- Affiliations
- Jet Propulsion Laboratory (US)
- ORCID
- Johnson, Andrew E.
- Venue
- 2008 IEEE Aerospace Conference
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Published
- 2008-03
- Pages
- 1-10
- ISSN
- 1095-323X (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2169314087
- Cited by
- 169
- References
- 25
- Citations by year
- 2026: 6 · 2025: 13 · 2024: 13 · 2023: 12 · 2022: 12 · 2021: 10 · 2020: 15 · 2019: 9 · 2018: 9 · 2017: 8 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 12 · 2014: 10 · 2013: 6 · 2012: 10
- FWCI
- 13.02
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- IEEE Aerospace Conference (AERO) (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- Charles Stark Draper Laboratory
- Jet Propulsion Laboratory
- Johnson Space Center
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Aerospace Engineering › Robotics and Sensor-Based Localization
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Aerospace Engineering › Inertial Sensor and Navigation
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Aerospace Engineering › Spacecraft Dynamics and Control
- Keywords
- terrain relative navigation, lunar landing, autonomous landing, hazard avoidance, contour matching, reference map, digital elevation maps, lunar imaging, positioning, velocity estimation
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