An Integrated Evaluation of Planetary Safe Landing Site

Abstract

With the development of precise landing technology,the terrain condition of the area that the vehicle can reach will be more and more complex. To ensure landing safety,the vehicle needs to assess the landing area topography in the field of view based on the sensor information and picks out a place suitable for landing. In order to solve this problem,the paper proposes a planetary landing site selection method and designs a referential selection index. The safe landing site is chosen according to the evaluation result of terrain condition and fuel consumption. MATLAB simulation proves the effectiveness of the method in both rapid selection process and traversal selection process,which improves mission success probability and landing safety.

Keywords

planetary topography / fuel consumption / landing site selection / safe landing / evaluation method