• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.40 no.4
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• pp.437-444
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• 2020

A lunar rover's optical camera is used to provide navigation and terrain information in an exploration zone. However, due to the scant presence of atmosphere, the Moon has homogeneous terrain with dark soil. Also, in extreme environments, the rover has limited data storage with low computation capability. Thus, for successful exploration, it is required to examine feature detection and matching methods which are robust to lunar terrain and environmental characteristics. In this research, SIFT, SURF, BRISK, ORB, and AKAZE are comparatively analyzed with lunar terrain images from a lunar rover. Experimental results show that SIFT and AKAZE are most robust for lunar terrain characteristics. AKAZE detects less quantity of feature points than SIFT, but feature points are detected and matched with high precision and the least computational cost. AKAZE is adequate for fast and accurate navigation information. Although SIFT has the highest computational cost, the largest quantity of feature points are stably detected and matched. The rover periodically sends terrain images to Earth. Thus, SIFT is suitable for global 3D terrain map construction in that a large amount of terrain images can be processed on Earth. Study results are expected to provide a guideline to utilize feature detection and matching methods for future lunar exploration rovers.

• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.113-120
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• 2015

When humans explore the Moon, lunar caves will be an ideal base to provide a shelter from the hazards of radiation, meteorite impact, and extreme diurnal temperature differences. In order to ascertain the existence of caves on the Moon, it is best to visit the Moon in person. The Google Lunar X Prize(GLXP) competition started recently to attempt lunar exploration missions. Ones of those groups competing, plan to land on a pit of Lacus Mortis and determine the existence of a cave inside this pit. In this pit, there is a ramp from the entrance down to the inside of the pit, which enables a rover to approach the inner region of the pit. In this study, under the assumption of the existence of a cave in this pit, a 3D model was developed based on the optical image data. Since this model simulates the actual terrain, the rendering of the model agrees well with the image data. Furthermore, the 3D printing of this model will enable more rigorous investigations and also could be used to publicize lunar exploration missions with ease.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• 2007.10a
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• pp.333-336
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• 2007

SELENE, a Japanese lunar mission, has been launched this year. There are large volumes of images that were already archived and will be archived by missions such as SELENE. Automatic image analysis systems, which extract useful information from large amounts of data, are now required. The authors propose Lunar Surface GIS, which archives lunar surface information collected by lunar orbiting spacecraft and conducts geological analysis automatically. This system includes automatic crater detection, automatic age determination, and lava thickness estimation methods. In this paper, methods for automatically determining the age and estimating the lava thickness of lunar mare are described. The lunar surface age was determined by analyzing data of detected crater size and number using a crater chronology method. Lava thickness was estimated by the extent of the overlying material around the crater as well as the composition of underlying terrain units. In this result, the age map at Mare Crisium suggests the mare had been formed 3.0-3.7 b.y. ago. The lava thickness result suggests the thickest part of the mare is distributed around the center of the mare. The Lunar Surface GIS can produce a geological map, age map, and mare lava thickness map, for example.

• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
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• v.40 no.4
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• pp.173-197
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• 2023

ShadowCam is a high-sensitivity, high-resolution imager provided by NASA for the Danuri (KPLO) lunar mission. ShadowCam calibration shows that it is well suited for its purpose, to image permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) that occur near the lunar poles. It is 205 times as sensitive as the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) Narrow Angle Camera (NAC). The signal to noise ratio (SNR) is greater than 100 over a large part of the dynamic range, and the top of the dynamic range is high enough to accommodate most brighter PSR pixels. The optical performance is good enough to take full advantage of the 1.7 meter/pixel image scale, and calibrated images have uniform response. We describe some instrument artifacts that are amenable to future corrections, making it possible to improve performance further. Stray light control is very challenging for this mission. In many cases, ShadowCam can image shadowed areas with directly illuminated terrain in or near the field of view (FOV). We include thorough qualitative descriptions of circumstances under which lunar brightness levels far higher than the top of the dynamic range cause detector or stray light artifacts and the size and extent of the artifact signal under those circumstances.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.33 no.3
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• pp.313-324
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• 2017

A lava tube is one of the hot issues of lunar science because it is regarded as a good candidate place for setting a lunar base. Recently much effort has been made to find lunar lava tubes. However, preceding works mainly made use of high-resolution lunar surface image data in conjunction with geomorphological consideration to present some lava tube candidates. Yet, those candidates stay no more than indirect indications. We propose a new data analysis technique of High Frequency (HF) radar observation data to find lunar lava tubes of which location depth is smaller than the range resolution of the radar pulse. Such shallow target echoes cannot be resolved from surface echoes, which presents the different location of the lunar surface compared to that of real lunar surface. The proposed technique instead finds the surface range (distance from LRS to the reflector of the most intense signal) anomaly which occurs as a result of the low range resolution of LRS pulse. We applied this technique to the surface range of Kaguya Lunar Radar Sounder (LRS) data. The surface range was deduced to make LRS surface elevation which was compared with the average surface elevation of Kaguya Digital Terrain Model (DTM). An anomalous discrepancy of the surface elevation was found in the Rima Galilaei area, which suggests the existence of a shallow lava tube.

• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
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• v.40 no.4
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• pp.149-171
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• 2023

ShadowCam is a National Aeronautics and Space Administration Advanced Exploration Systems funded instrument hosted onboard the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO) satellite. By collecting high-resolution images of permanently shadowed regions (PSRs), ShadowCam will provide critical information about the distribution and accessibility of water ice and other volatiles at spatial scales (1.7 m/pixel) required to mitigate risks and maximize the results of future exploration activities. The PSRs never see direct sunlight and are illuminated only by light reflected from nearby topographic highs. Since secondary illumination is very dim, ShadowCam was designed to be over 200 times more sensitive than previous imagers like the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera Narrow Angle Camera (LROC NAC). ShadowCam images thus allow for unprecedented views into the shadows, but saturate while imaging sunlit terrain.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.20 no.7
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• pp.630-637
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• 2019

The scientific, economical and industrial values of the Moon have been increased, as massive ice-water and rare resource were founded from the lunar exploration missions. Korea and other major space agencies in the world are competitively developing the ISRU (In Situ Resource Utilization) technology to secure future lunar resource as well as to construct the lunar base. To prepare for the lunar construction, it is essential to develop the rover based construction spatial information technology to provide a decision-making aided information during the lunar construction process. Thus, this research presented the construction spatial information technology based upon rover's camera system. Specifically, the conceptual design of rover based camera system was designed for acquisition of a rover's navigation image, and lunar terrain and construction images around the rover. The reference architecture of the rover operation system was designed for computation of the lunar construction spatial information. Also, rover's localization and terrain reconstruction methods were introduced considering the characteristics of lunar surface environments. It is necessary to test and validate the conceptual design of the construction spatial information technology. Thus, in the future study, the developed rover and rover operation system will be applied to the lunar terrestrial analogue site for further improvements.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.46 no.6
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• pp.479-486
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• 2018

In order to ensure reliable navigation performance of a lunar exploration rover, navigation algorithms using additional sensors such as inertial measurement units and cameras are essential on lunar surface in the absence of a global navigation satellite system. Unprecedentedly, Visual Odometry (VO) using a stereo camera has been successfully implemented at the US Mars rovers. In this paper, we estimate the 6-DOF pose of the lunar exploration rover from gray images of a lunar-like terrains. The proposed algorithm estimates relative pose of consecutive images by sparse image alignment based semi-direct VO. In order to overcome vulnerability to non-linearity of direct VO, we add adaptive motion prior weights calculated from a linear function of the previous pose to the optimization cost function. The proposed algorithm is verified in lunar-like terrain dataset recorded by Toronto University reflecting the characteristics of the actual lunar environment.