Abstract
Tianwen-1 (TW-1) is the first Chinese interplanetary mission to have accomplished orbiting, landing, and patrolling in a single exploration of Mars. After safe landing, it is essential to reconstruct the descent trajectory and determine the landing site of the lander. For this purpose, we processed descent images of the TW-1 optical obstacle-avoidance sensor (OOAS) and digital orthophoto map (DOM) of the landing area using our proposed hybrid-matching method, in which the landing process is divided into two parts. In the first, crater matching is used to obtain the geometric transformations between the OOAS images and DOM to calculate the position of the lander. In the second, feature matching is applied to compute the position of the lander. We calculated the landing site of TW-1 to be 109.9259° E, 25.0659° N with a positional accuracy of 1.56 m and reconstructed the landing trajectory with a horizontal root mean squared error of 1.79 m. These results will facilitate the analyses of the obstacle-avoidance system and optimize the control strategy in the follow-up planetary-exploration missions.
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Anran Wang received her M.S. degree from the University of Information Engineering in 2019, and now she is a Ph.D. candidate at Bei**g Institute of Control Engineering, mainly engaged in research on computer vision, visual navigation and localization. E-mail: war07101@163.com.
Li Wang received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from Northwestern Polytechnical University in 1998, 2001, 2004, respectively, mainly engaged in research on spatial optoelectronic technology and machine vision. E-mail: wupeng3992@163.com.
Yinuo Zhang received her B.S. degree from Wuhan University in 2016 and her M.S. degree from Wuhan University in 2018, mainly engaged in remote sensing applications, image processing algorithms, etc. E-mail: ZhangYn950303@163.com.
Baocheng Hua received his B.S. degree from North University of Technology in 2005 and Ph.D. degree from Beihang University in 2011, mainly engaged in the research of machine vision, optical navigation, deep space exploration, etc. E-mail: 85340287@qq.com.
Tao Li received his bachelor degree from Zhengzhou University in 2007, master degree from Bei**g Institute of Technology in 2009, and Ph.D. degree from Bei**g Institute of Technology in 2014, mainly engaged in digital image processing, visual measurement, structured light, etc. E-mail: ietaoli@163.com.
Yang Liu received her B.S. degree from Nan**g University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2015 and her M.S. degree from China Academy of Space Technology in 2018, mainly engaged in image processing, landing obstacle avoidance, etc. E-mail: ly15605188503@163.com.
Danyong Lin received his master degree from Bei**g Institute of Technology in 2019, and is now a Ph.D. student in Bei**g Institute of Control Engineering, mainly engaged in computer vision, 3D points cloud reconstruction. E-mail: 13001044577@163.com.
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Wang, A., Wang, L., Zhang, Y. et al. Landing site positioning and descent trajectory reconstruction of Tianwen-1 on Mars. Astrodyn 6, 69–79 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42064-021-0121-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42064-021-0121-1