The Gigapixel Exploration of Space: New Ways of Exploring the Moon, Mars, and Beyond

No abstract availabl

Planetary Exploration Rebooted! New Ways of Exploring the Moon, Mars and Beyond

In this talk, I will summarize how the NASA Ames Intelligent Robotics Group has been developing and field testing planetary robots for human exploration, creating automated planetary mapping systems, and engaging the public as citizen scientists

Locating the LCROSS Impact Craters

The Lunar CRater Observations and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission impacted a spent Centaur rocket stage into a permanently shadowed region near the lunar south pole. The Sheperding Spacecraft (SSC) separated \sim9 hours before impact and performed a small braking maneuver in order to observe the Centaur impact plume, looking for evidence of water and other volatiles, before impacting itself. This paper describes the registration of imagery of the LCROSS impact region from the mid- and near-infrared cameras onboard the SSC, as well as from the Goldstone radar. We compare the Centaur impact features, positively identified in the first two, and with a consistent feature in the third, which are interpreted as a 20 m diameter crater surrounded by a 160 m diameter ejecta region. The images are registered to Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter (LRO) topographical data which allows determination of the impact location. This location is compared with the impact location derived from ground-based tracking and propagation of the spacecraft's trajectory and with locations derived from two hybrid imagery/trajectory methods. The four methods give a weighted average Centaur impact location of -84.6796\circ, -48.7093\circ, with a 1{\sigma} un- certainty of 115 m along latitude, and 44 m along longitude, just 146 m from the target impact site. Meanwhile, the trajectory-derived SSC impact location is -84.719\circ, -49.61\circ, with a 1{\sigma} uncertainty of 3 m along the Earth vector and 75 m orthogonal to that, 766 m from the target location and 2.803 km south-west of the Centaur impact. We also detail the Centaur impact angle and SSC instrument pointing errors. Six high-level LCROSS mission requirements are shown to be met by wide margins. We hope that these results facilitate further analyses of the LCROSS experiment data and follow-up observations of the impact region.Comment: Accepted for publication in Space Science Review. 24 pages, 9 figure

Parallel Bundle Adjustment of High Resolution Satellite Imagery

Bundle adjustment is the process of minimizing errors in camera and three-dimensional structure parameters. The bundle adjustment process is applicable to many areas of geospatial awareness, computer vision, robotics, and imaging, both terrestrial imaging and remote sensing. In the case of remote sensing and planetary imaging, current methods do not adequately address geographic areas consisting of both a large number of images and image observations. Other application domains focus on a single portion of the bundle adjustment process, the solution of a linear system, but ignore the computation of the coefficient matrix. In this thesis we propose a fully parallel approach to the bundle adjustment problem. This approach includes parallel computation of the required partial derivatives, which also addresses load-imbalance inherent in the problem, a parallel solution to the required linear system, and novel parallel preconditioning techniques for this system. Additionally we investigate the use of a relational database to enable fast recomputation due to image addition or removal. As other research has shown, preconditioning the linear system present in the bundle adjustment problem is critical. We present two novel, parallel preconditioners, also based on the geographic information of the input data. These preconditioners are specific to the planetary imaging application domain and address the specific matrix structure that arises in this area. We show that the parallel derivative methods achieve a high level of parallel efficiency and work well with the usage of a parallel, distributed memory, linear solver. The demonstrated preconditioners make a tangible reduction in the number of required solver iterations. Lastly, because these problems are solved many times for various applications, we present a database-backed method which stores derivative information, thereby easily allowing for projects to be re-run quickly, or modified slightly without a large recomputation cost. All of these elements result in a completely parallel bundle adjustment system capable of processing large geographic areas with millions of image observations

3d lunar terrain reconstruction from apollo images

Abstract. Generating accurate three dimensional planetary models is becoming increasingly important as NASA plans manned missions to return to the Moon in the next decade. This paper describes a 3D surface reconstruction system called the Ames Stereo Pipeline that is designed to produce such models automatically by processing orbital stereo imagery. We discuss two important core aspects of this system: (1) refinement of satellite station positions and pose estimates through least squares bundle adjustment; and (2) a stochastic plane fitting algorithm that generalizes the Lucas-Kanade method for optimal matching between stereo pair images.. These techniques allow us to automatically produce seamless, highly accurate digital elevation models from multiple stereo image pairs while significantly reducing the influence of image noise. Our technique is demonstrated on a set of 71 high resolution scanned images from the Apollo 15 mission.