Terrain-Relative Navigation and Employee Development (TRaiNED)

Mission Concept:

• Bring autonomous terrain-relative navigation (TRN) and hazard detection (HD) technology to TRL7
• Greatly improve targeting accuracy and hazard avoidance for robotic landers, aerial navigation, near-surface hover control for small bodies, and surface rover navigation
• Enable exploring many high-value landing sites on many key solar system bodies
• During a sounding rocket flight we will capture:
• Exo-atmospheric imagery
• Low-altitude imagery
• Imagery-correlated IMU data
• Imagery-correlated GPS data

What is the project up against?
Advantages:

• Existing platform, partial design, and staff experience from 41.068 NT/Seybold sounding rocket flight
• Good balance of science objectives, tech development, integration, test, and flight
• Build & flight experience within first year
• Won NASA HOPE TO

Challenges:

• Data loss from operational failure requires extensive rebuilding, since experiment hardware may not survive landing

Schedule: Major milestones

• Preliminary Design Review: 8/2009
• Critical Design Review: 11/2009
• Mission Readiness Review: 4/2010
• Launch: 12/6/2010

Project members:

1. Donald G Heyer Project Manager