Onboard Adaptive Safe Site Identification System, Year 2 (OASSIS)

Current landing sensors and algorithms allow us to land within a few kilometers from the target site. Human lander missions, or future robotic landers, will need to land within 100’s to 10’s of meters from the target site. Recent NASA projects such as SPLICE (Safe and Precise Landing Integrated Capabilities Evolution), have been advancing precision landing technologies through the development of space hardware and flight testing. The goal of the OASSIS project is to bridge the gap between pure simulation and costly flight tests by providing a physical platform to experiment with new research algorithms while using representative sensors in motion. Currently, OASSIS is developing a small lab-scale platform with guidance, navigation, and control (GN&C) sensors and software with the goal of researching and maturing precision landing functions. The platform, named Navigation, Estimation, and Sensing Testbed (NEST), enables lunar lander flight software to be tested dynamically without the need of a costly flight campaign and without the risk of catastrophic hardware loss. NEST has enough sensors and software to perform terrain relative navigation functions by identifying and tracking surface features to help reduce navigation errors and avoid terrain hazards that could potentially damage a lander.