NGC Aérospatiale Ltée

Published purpose

Space agencies, research institutes and private organizations are looking for commercial landing services in order to reach sites of interest on the Moon. The landing systems will need to be equipped with high-accuracy navigation systems to accurately reach their target. Since there is no GPS constellation around the Moon for real-time localisation, or other readily available commercial systems to answer this need, a novel approach is needed to provide positioning of orbiters or landers around the Moon. The “Crater-Based Absolute Navigation Demonstration” project aims at filling this need by demonstrating a GPS-like system in support for future Moon exploration missions. This system will use features on the ground – Moon craters – as references to autonomously determine the position of orbiters and landers in Moon geographical coordinates. This will increase the accuracy at touchdown by orders of magnitude with respect to current capabilities and help meet the challenging requirements of future Moon precision landing missions.