Currently, spacecraft rely on routine Earth communication in order to navigate. This communication network (DSN) is already oversubscribed and expensive to use, and an extended loss-of-comm situation could mean loss of crew/vehicle. Therefore, an onboard navigation solution is needed that could operate independent of Earth communication. Orion is equipped with an optical navigation (OpNav) system that uses an onboard camera to capture & process images of the Earth/Moon to estimate the vehicle range/bearing based on the size/position of the horizon arc in the imagery. This works well, but only when the horizon is visible. At far ranges when planets appear as points of light (unresolved horizons), or close ranges when all you see is surface terrain (horizon outside the field-of-view), classical OpNav isn't possible, but other methods are. Namely planetary triangulation (for far-range) and terrain feature identification (for close-range). Developing a multi-functional image processing system capable of such Target & Range-adaptive Optical Navigation is the focus of Project TRON. Novel, optimal methods for triangulation and crater-identification have recently been published which we are working to incorporate, along with machine-learning techniques for the crater detection process. The first year of the project is focused on prototyping the algorithms and maximizing performance, and the second year is focused on flight software conversion and hardware integration, before delivering a hardware/software package to a flight provider for a test demonstration.

When TRON is completed, it will offer a suite of OpNav capabilities that be infused on a variety of manned/unmanned spacecraft to enable autonomous, onboard navigation across a wide range of mission profiles. This will reduce crew/vehicle/mission risk across the spaceflight community.