Planetary Lander Piloting Technology
The PANGU (Plant and Asteroid Natural-scene Generation Utility) tool developed over 2001-6 is now being widely used by the European Space Agency (ESA) and space industry to support the design of planetary lander guidance systems. PANGU is an important part of ESA's €700M Aurora programme for Mars exploration. Dundee has designed an image processing chip for image feature extraction and tracking which is being used by EADS Astrium (Europe's largest manufacturer of spacecraft) and others in the design of a vision-based navigation camera. This camera was tested using PANGU and further successful trials will allow it to be considered for the ESA Mars Sample Return missions, developments for which form the key aim for PANGU development over the next few years.
http://spacetech.dundee.ac.uk
People working within this theme: Iain Martin, Steve Parkes, Martin Dunstan, Mark McCrum
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