• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.38 no.6_1
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• pp.1015-1023
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• 2022

The Entry-Descent-Landing process of a lander involves many environmental and technical challenges. To solve these problems, recently, terrestrial relative navigation (TRN) technology has been essential for landers. TRN is a technology for estimating the position and attitude of a lander by comparing Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data and image data collected from a descending lander with pre-built reference data. In this paper, we present a method for generating descent dataset and extracting landmarks, which are key elements for developing TRN technologies to be used on Mars. The proposed method generates IMU data of a descending lander using a simulated Mars landing trajectory and generates descent images from high-resolution ortho-map and digital elevation map through a ray tracing technique. Landmark extraction is performed by an area-based extraction method due to the low-textured surfaces on Mars. In addition, search area reduction is carried out to improve matching accuracy and speed. The performance evaluation result for the descent dataset generation method showed that the proposed method can generate images that satisfy the imaging geometry. The performance evaluation result for the landmark extraction method showed that the proposed method ensures several meters of positioning accuracy while ensuring processing speed as fast as the feature-based methods.