抄録
The ability of pinpoint soft landing to lunar or planetary surfaces can broaden the range of scientific missions. SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon) is a small spacecraft (〜400 kg) for demonstration of the pinpoint landing technology and is being studied extensively in ISAS, JAXA. The key technology for SLIM is image-based navigation. The landing strategy consists of 'powered descent' with continuous burning of the main thrusters and 'vertical descent' below an altitude of about 3.5 km. In the powered descent, the spacecraft is controlled by surface relative navigation with image-based schemes such as geographical feature (e.g., crater) matching. In the vertical descent, autonomous obstacle detection and avoidance is carried out using image-based information like shadow. In this paper, image processing methods under consideration and the concept of hardware implementation are described.
