Planetary Surface Image Generation for Testing Future Space Missions with PANGU

Testing the image processing functions critical to the guidance systems of autonomous spacecraft landers for future space missions is a challenging task. One solution is to generate realistic synthetic images of the proposed planetary or asteroid surface to test the navigation and guidance systems in closed-loop tests. This paper presents a solution to this problem with the PANGU tool which creates multi resolution models of planets and asteroids by enhancing the resolution of real terrain data with representative terrain and generates realistic, high-quality, synthetic images in real-time using a custom GPU-based renderer which includes a parameterizable camera model.