Advanced image processing in space applications: the new trend to increase the success rate of exploration space missions

Nowadays, space agencies have increased their research eorts in order to enhance the success rate of space exploration missions. The guided landing is becoming an hot topic and future space missions will increasingly adopt Video Based Navigation (VBN) systems to assist the entry, descent and landing (EDL) phase of space modules, enhancing the precision of automatic EDL systems. Since the EDL system has real-time constraints, the VBN system must work at high speed. Thus, we have developed a library of FPGA-based IP-cores useful to hardware-accelerate the image processing tasks involved in VBN systems. This paper presents a navigation system that is able to both manage the navigation of the spacecraft and the pose estimation through a VBN system which uses the aforementioned IP-cores implemented on a FPGA device. Two possible use of these IP-cores to implement two dierent image processing chains are shown, and results highlight that the proposed hardware architecture ensures real-time performances.