GALCIT Colloquium

New and ambitious mission concepts under consideration by NASA and other space agencies have sparked an intensified interest in optical navigation (OPNAV). The primary attraction of OPNAV techniques is that they allow for fully autonomous onboard navigation, thus reducing or removing the requirement for ground-based tracking. Such a capability is especially important for crewed missions that must be capable of safely returning to Earth after a communication system failure or for deep-space missions where light time-of-flight precludes ground-in-the-loop navigation. In this seminar, we will focus on recent advances in horizon-based techniques for precision OPNAV. We will explore a number of geometric properties that provide valuable insight into the fundamental workings of OPNAV solution methods. Performance will be shown along a reference lunar return trajectory and various OPNAV algorithms will be compared.