Fundamentals of Vision Based Navigation
This webcast will introduce participants to the fundamental ideas behind spacecraft optical navigation. We will begin by discussing camera projection and how pixel coordinates in an image may be related to line-of-sight directions. With this in mind, we will explore some common optical navigation measurement techniques including centroiding, star-limb measurements, and landmark tracking. These techniques have found widespread use in exploration missions to the Moon, other planets, comets, and asteroids. Beyond this, optical navigation methods may also be used for relative navigation in support of rendezvous, proximity operations, and docking (RPOD) activities. We will briefly discuss some techniques used for these applications, such as Natural Feature Image Recognition (NFIR) algorithms.
