Description: Planetary landing systems are constrained by performance, size, weight, and power (SWaP), and cost of active hazard detection (HD) sensor systems that enable real-time terrain mapping and safe site selection. The time it takes an HD sensor system to scan, produce an elevation map that corrects for spacecraft motion, and compute safe landing sites is a critical bottleneck that requires trading fuel mass (delta-V) with scan resolution and accuracy in order to achieve a desired level of mission assurance. A low-SWaP sensor capable of accurately scanning a target landing region to a resolution of 10 cm or better in just two seconds would enable lower cost planetary landers while providing hazard detection capabilities that enhance landing safety and mission assurance, including payload deployment onto the surface. Astrobotic's RApid Scanning Terrain Resolver (RASTR) sensor solution addresses this lander mission assurance bottleneck by increasing the responsiveness and adaptability of the LiDAR sensor. RASTR will reduce the amount of time and power needed generate accurate terrain maps in real time. Astrobotic will combine its heritage high performance space-grade computing, flight-ready LiDAR processing algorithms, and validated physics-based simulation and terrain modeling tools with a state-of-the-art on-chip ultra-long-range frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) LiDAR commercial product and novel single-shot depth estimation machine learning algorithms. Building a system to better optimize around an increased scanning speed and lower SWaP and cost is critical to reducing the barriers to entry of integrating this sensor type into NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) landers. Existing space-grade HD sensor system components do not take advantage of economies of scale (e.g., the autonomous vehicle and drone markets), resulting in cost and lead times being a limiting factor to commercial capabilities.

Benefits: RASTR brings together unique commercial expertise in LiDAR hazard detection for planetary landing, state-of-the-art COTS components, and a U.S.-based supply chain to meet the challenging performance specifications in the solicitation. Improved lander planning and efficiency are felt most acutely in the near-term mission budget of commercial CLPS integrators. In the energy constrained and challenging environments of lunar landings and rover maneuverability, solutions like RASTR create both new data and more rapid data response capabilities that will jointly become increasingly valuable buy-downs of risk for NASA and the U.S. taxpayer alike. RASTR technology will also be highly relevant to high-speed autonomous rover perception and navigation, small-body science missions, relative navigation and mapping for RPOD and inspection missions, robotic in-space assembly and verification operations, and numerous defense applications. All of these would benefit from the combination of low SWaP, fast long-range scanning, and unique velocimetry capabilities.Commercial Customers: Potential direct customers include other CLPS lander providers, larger scale domestic lander providers (e.g., Blue Origin, with which Astrobotic has active work as a member of the National Team human lander program) and international lander providers, with indirect customers being national agencies like JAXA or ESA who are conducting planetary surface science missions requiring a lander. Use cases for RASTR technology are represented by landers, rovers, RPOD and ISAM technologies. In the near term, we believe the largest market demand for RASTR will come from two market sectors: lunar landers and rovers, and commercial RPOD and ISAM. Real-time environmental and situational experience data gained from flight heritage will eventually be key to enabling future customers to succeed in their missions, meaning there will be a first-mover advantage of building up this data and experience to reinvest in the community. Military Customers: Military customers and their use cases are diverse and might include use cases like terrestrial munitions guidance systems tasked with navigating and operating confidently in a GPS- or local-connectivity-denied environment. Solutions like Astrobotic's Xogdor point-to-point rocket delivery could rely on RASTR to precisely maneuver to and deliver goods to target areas in combat zones.