A new video compiles 309 images taken by NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, providing an historic record of a three-year trek that totaled about 13 miles across a Martian plain pocked with smaller craters. While Opportunity was traveling from Victoria crater to Endeavour crater, between...

In order to simulate physically plausible surfaces that represent geologically evolved surfaces, demonstrating demanding surface-relative guidance navigation and control (GN&C) actions, such surfaces must be made to mimic the geological processes themselves....

COAST (Coastal On-line Assessment and Synthesis Tool) is a 3D, open-source Earth data browser developed by leveraging and enhancing previous NASA open-source tools. These tools use satellite imagery and elevation data in a way that allows any user to zoom from orbit view down into any place on...

Texture analysis would permit improved autonomous, onboard science data interpretation for adaptive navigation, sampling, and downlink decisions. These analyses would assist with terrain analysis and instrument placement in both macroscopic and microscopic image data products. Unfortunately,...

A novel computational framework was developed of a 2D affine invariant matching exploiting a parameter space. Named as affine invariant parameter space (AIPS), the technique can be applied to many image-processing and computer-vision problems, including image registration, template...

A solution was developed that matches visible/IR imagery aboard a balloon in Saturn’s moon Titan’s atmosphere to SAR (synthetic aperture radar) and visible/IR data acquired from orbit. A balloon in Titan’s atmosphere must be able to localize itself autonomously...

An algorithm denoted “Gamma-SLAM” performs further processing, in real time, of preprocessed digitized images acquired by a stereoscopic pair of electronic cameras aboard an off-road robotic ground vehicle to build accurate maps of the terrain and determine the location of the vehicle with respect to the...

The original G-Guidance algorithm provided an autonomous guidance and control policy for small-body proximity operations that took into account uncertainty and dynamics disturbances. However, there was a lack of robustness in regards to object proximity while in autonomous mode. The modified G-Guidance...

The Planetary Image Geometry (PIG) library is a multi-mission library used for projecting images (EDRs, or Experiment Data Records) and managing their geometry for in-situ missions. A collection of models describes cameras and their articulation, allowing application programs such as mosaickers, terrain generators,...

A suite of programs for the generation of disparity maps from stereo image pairs via correlation, and conversion of those disparity maps to XYZ maps, has been updated. This suite implements an automated method of deriving terrain from stereo images for use in the ground data system for in-situ (lander and rover) cameras....

Based only on its appearance in imagery, this program uses close-range 3D terrain analysis to produce training data sufficient to estimate the traversability of terrain beyond 3D sensing range. This approach is called learning from stereo (LFS). In effect, the software...

MISR (Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer) INteractive eXplorer (MINX) is an interactive visualization program that allows a user to digitize smoke, dust, or volcanic plumes in MISR multiangle images, and automatically retrieve height and wind profiles associated with those plumes. This innovation can perform 9-camera...

A measurement-based radiance estimation approach for vicarious radiometric calibration of spaceborne multispectral remote sensing systems has been developed. This simplified process eliminates the use of radiative transfer codes and reduces the number of atmospheric assumptions required to perform sensor...

A genetic programming (GP)-based, nonlinear modeling structure relates soil moisture with synthetic-apertureradar (SAR) images to present representative soil moisture estimates at the watershed scale. Surface soil moisture measurement is difficult to obtain over a large area due to a...

An integrated modeling tool has been developed to include multi-body dynamics, orbital dynamics, and touch-and-go dynamics for spacecraft covering three types of end- effectors: a sticky pad, a brush-wheel sampler, and a pellet gun.