SIMULATING LUNAR APPROACH AND PINPOINT LANDINGS THROUGH ENHANCING DEMS AND REALISTIC IMAGE GENERATION

Plans for future lunar exploration through both robotic and planned human controlled missions are defining increasingly stringent requirements for guidance of approach, surface relative navigation, and hazard detection, for pin-point landings on difficult terrain under contrasting illumination conditions. Autonomous GNC and hazard avoidance systems are continuing to be developed and validated to meet these mission requirements. This paper describes the creation of two representative lunar simulations to cover a pinpoint landing, utilising high-quality publicly available Digital Elevation Models and a long-distance approach over a hemisphere of the Moon. These are imported into the Planet and Asteroid Natural Scene Generation Utility, enhanced with representative terrain and small-scale features below the viable resolution of the DEMs and high-frequency texture to obtain a large, high-resolution 3D model. Synthetic surface images are rendered with appropriate lighting and camera- distortion in realtime. These scenarios are not tailored for specific missions but are instead designed to be representative of potential missions which can be modified with different input data and generation parameters as required. Details are included of the imported DEMs, and the creation of the resolution enhanced models used to generate the images sequence including resolution and frame rates obtained of the simulated descents.