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Advances in Space Research 42 (2008) 379385 www.elsevier.com/locate/asr

GNC system scheme for lunar soft landing spacecraft

Dayi Wang, Xiangyu Huang *, Yifeng Guan
National Laboratory of Space Intelligent Control, Beijing Institute of Control Engineering, P.O. Box 2729-20, Beijing 100080, PR China Received 30 November 2006; received in revised form 25 June 2007; accepted 17 August 2007

Abstract A pinpoint autonomous GNC system scheme for lunar soft landing is proposed. First, the descriptions of the mission outline for lunar soft landing are provided. Second, the GNC system design of the spacecraft is proposed. The baseline is a 3-axis stabilized system during all the phases of the mission. Orbit maneuvers are achieved by an assembled constant thrust or a throttleable main engine. The attitude control actuators are thrusters. The attitude and orbit determination is performed by sun sensors, star sensors, Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), altimeter, velocimeter and lunar imaging sensors. Third, some proposed autonomous navigation and guidance methods including hazard detection and avoidance for lunar soft landing are analyzed. Finally, we draw some conclusions. 2007 COSPAR. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Lunar soft landing; GNC system; Autonomous navigation and guidance; Hazard detection and avoidance

1. Introduction The Moon is recognized as an important destination for space science and exploration. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, various landings on the Moon were made by Surveyor, Apollo and Russian Luna spacecraft. Early completed landings were all aimed at targets at low to medium latitudes where the ground conditions were felt to be reasonably level and suitable for a landing in relatively unknown territory. Future lunar exploration missions will require the capability to perform precision autonomous GNC to the selected landing site. Pinpoint landing capability will allow to reach landing sites which may lie in areas containing hazardous terrain features (such as escarpments, craters, rocks or slopes) or to land accurately at select landing sites of high science value. To complete such precision landing mission, a pinpoint autonomous GNC system is required. A pinpoint autonomous GNC system scheme for lunar soft landing spacecraft is proposed based on the research of the GNC for lunar soft landing in this paper.
*

The organization of the paper is as follows. Descriptions of the mission outline for lunar soft landing are provided in Section 2. Section 3 describes the GNC system scheme for lunar soft landing spacecraft. The autonomous navigation and guidance methods for soft lunar landing are described in Section 4. Finally, some conclusions are given in Section 5. 2. Mission outline of lunar soft landing Lunar soft landing spacecraft plans to be sent into an Earth-moon transfer orbit to perform the lunar soft landing mission and shall be carried on a Long March vehicle. After several mid-course trajectory corrections, the spacecraft will arrive in a lunar circular orbit. Then the spacecraft will arrive at perilune after Hohmann transfer and start its soft landing. After several complicated orbit maneuvers, the spacecraft will land at the specied landing site on the lunar surface within the allowable error range. The ight process is shown in Figs. 1 and 2. The soft landing process is divided into four phases. The rst phase is the powered descent phase, from 15 km to 2 km altitude above the lunar surface. In this phase, the relative velocity of the spacecraft to the Moon will drop from 1.6 km/s or so to

Corresponding author. E-mail address: huangxyhit@sina.com (X. Huang).

0273-1177/$34.00 2007 COSPAR. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.asr.2007.08.031

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Fig. 1. Schematic of ight trajectory for lunar soft landing spacecraft.

Hohmann transfer powered descent

attitude adjustment

an assembled constant thrust engine or a throttleable thrust engine. Attitude determination is performed by sun sensors, star sensors and IMU. The orbit determination for the Earth-moon transfer and the lunar circular orbit phases is performed by ground deep space networks. Orbit determination and lunar surface terrain identication during landing phase are performed by IMU, altimeter, velocimeter and lunar surface imaging sensor. The GNC system conguration of lunar landing spacecraft is shown in Fig. 3. 3.1. Conguration and functions of the system 3.1.1. Sensors
2km

0 m/s. The second phase is the attitude adjustment phase, from 2 km to 100 m altitude above the lunar surface. The landing attitude should be adjusted to be vertical to the lunar surface in a period as short as possible. During this phase, a thrust engine will be used to cancel the lunar gravity. In this way, the spacecraft could slowly descend in variable velocity. The third phase is terminal landing phase from 100 m to 4 m altitude above the lunar surface. The velocity caused by lunar gravity should be cancelled to make the terminal velocity reduce to 0 m/s. During this phase, a lunar imaging sensor is used to explore the terrain of landing site. The spacecraft could perform the translation to choose appropriate landing site. The fourth phase is the free descent phase from 4 m to 0 m altitude above the landing site. 3. GNC system scheme for lunar soft landing spacecraft The baseline is a 3-axis stabilized system during all the phases of the mission. Attitude control is performed by the bi-propellant thruster. Orbit maneuver is achieved by

100km lunar surface

Fig. 2. Schematic of lunar soft landing.

15km

terminal landing

free descent

(1) Sun sensors and star sensors. There are three kinds of sun sensors, which are digital Sun sensors, analog Sun sensors and Sun Presence detectors, used for three dierent kinds of operation conditions. The three star sensors are used to guarantee the global acquisition and tracking capability. (2) IMU. IMU includes gyros and accelerometers and is used for attitude and orbit measurement for spacecraft, which is one of the key units of GNC system. IMU is the major measurement element particularly during orbit maneuver and soft landing phases. (1) Gyro cluster includes six single degree of freedom rate integrating gyros and is used for measuring the three-axis attitude angular relative speed of spacecraft wrt the inertial space. Any three of six gyros could form an operation mode to complete the attitude measurement mission independently. (2) There are four accelerometers. The gauging axes of three accelerometers are parallel to three spacecraft principal axes of inertia, respectively. One accelerometer is equipped slantingly. (3) Altimeter. Altimeter is used to measure the distance between spacecraft and lunar surface along its line-of-sight direction during soft landing

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velometer

altimeter

lunar imaging sensor

external position sensors

star sensors

Sun sensors

external attitude sensors

local data bus

GNC Computer

IMU

Kalman filter

transmitter data local data bus

accelerometers(4) gyros(6)

gyro/accelerometer data processing

data memory

actuator

orbit control thruster

attitude control thruster

Fig. 3. Schematic diagram of GNC system conguration for lunar landing spacecraft.

phase. The other related position information could be obtained according to the attitude. There are two kinds of altimeters: radar altimeter and laser altimeter. The measurement modes of radar altimeter are more widely used in foreign spacecraft in the past. Laser distance measurement methods include pulse and phase laser distance measurement. The former method uses pulse laser as transmitter. Laser peak power is high. The operating distance is long. The latter method uses the continuous modulation laser. The operating distance is short, and the measurement accuracy is high. (4) Velocimeter. Velocimeter is used to measure the velocity of spacecraft along its line-of-sight direction during the soft landing phase. The other related velocity information could be obtained according to the attitude. There are two kinds of velocimeters: microwave velocimeter and laser velocimeter. Laser and microwave velocity measurement methods include the distance dierential method and the method based on Doppler Eect. Moreover, microwave velocity measurement method could also use coherent pulse technique for velocity measurement. (5) Lunar imaging sensor. Lunar imaging sensor is used to obtain the image of lunar surface during soft landing phase. Then the data will be transmitted to GNC computer, which will process, judge and choose the proper landing site. Lunar imaging sensor includes three-dimensional imaging sensor and optical imaging sensor. Based on the operation principles, the three-dimensional imaging modes are divided into laser and microwave imaging.

(1) Laser three-dimensional imaging sensor has two different operation modes of scanning and non-scanning. Great dierences exist in operation principles, system conguration, performance index, applicable scope and complexity degree between the two operation systems. The imaging of scanning laser threedimensional imaging sensor applies point-to-point measurement method to acquire the altitude information of every point within eld of view. After acquiring the data of all the points within the eld of view, the sensor will splice and process these data. The disadvantages of this sensor are slow imaging rate, high operating frequency of laser, large amount of power consumption, low data splicing accuracy and so on. Non-scanning laser three-dimensional imaging technique applies laser to illuminate the whole target in one time. The information of intensity and distance of every image element in the target could be measured in one time. There are no scanning equipments in this kind of laser three-dimensional imaging sensors with the advantages of high imaging rate and high measurement accuracy, which are the ideal three-dimensional imaging sensors for soft landing on the moon. (2) Microwave three-dimensional imaging sensor has two dierent operation modes of scanning and non-scanning. Based on the power time distribution of echo wave, non-scanning technique gets the mean altitude and roughness of lunar surface in every image element. The terrain features of lunar surface could be achieved from these two parameters. (3) Optical imaging sensor could realize the shape recovery for the light and shadow of images and detect hazard according to the altitude and illumination conditions. It is easy to realize its product.

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3.1.2. Actuator (1) Orbit control thruster. It is a liquid bi-propellant thruster. Case 1: ve 2500 N and four 490 N constant thrust engine assembly is selected. Case 2: a throttleable thrust engine with the range of thrust from 3000 N to 18,000 N is selected. (2) Attitude control thruster. Bi-propellant thrusters are used. 10 150 N thrusters and 12 10 N thrusters will be equipped. The 12 10 N thruster is used for attitude control during non-maneuver period, forming the double branches as redundancy each other. The 6 150 N thruster is used for attitude control during orbit maneuver period. The other 4 150 N thruster provides the horizontal maneuver capability. 3.1.3. GNC computer GNC computer will collect and process the data from all the sensors and actuators; perform GNC calculation; issue control signals to actuators, etc.

3.2. Operation modes 3.2.1. Operation modes during the earth-moon transfer phase and the lunar circular phase (1) Rate damping, applied to separation between satellite and launch vehicle and to fail-safe program. (2) Sun orientation, applied to cruising attitude operation before revolving around the moon and to failsafe program. (3) Star orientation, applied to cruising attitude operation before entering lunar orbit and to establish the ring attitude before and after each orbit maneuver. (4) Inertial attitude adjustment, applied to establishing the ring attitude before each orbit maneuver and to earth shadow period. (5) Orbit control orientation, applied to each time of orbit transfer phase before revolving around the moon and to orbit control phase when revolving around the moon. (6) Starlight lunar orbit, applied to normal operation during lunar circular phase. (7) Gyro lunar orbit, applied to attitude maneuver during lunar circular phase and to moon shadow period.

3.2.2. Operation modes during the landing phase The operation modes of GNC system during landing phase are divided according to the guidance and control process.

(1) Powered descent. The brake engine res at perilune to cancel the initial velocity of the lander and ameouts until about 2 km altitude above lunar surface. Most of the fuel carried by the lander will be used during this phase. Optimal fuel consumption should be the base for this guidance process. Explicit guidance method is used in powered descent phase. The main thruster in landing propulsion system operates. Attitude control is achieved by a 150 N thruster. Attitude determination is achieved by making use of gyro prediction method. Autonomous navigation performed by IMU is used along with velocity and distance correction. (2) Attitude adjustment. Landing attitude should be adjusted to be vertical to the landing site in quite a short time (about 10 s). Soft landing requires the lander to land on lunar surface in vertical attitude. Therefore, attitude adjustment should be conducted immediately after the end of powered descent phase. From the angle of fuel consumption, the shorter the attitude adjustment time is the better. However, if the time is too short, the terminal angle error will increase. During this period, the increment in vertical velocity caused by lunar gravitational acceleration should be avoided. The thrust is required to be almost equal to the lunar gravity of the lander. At the same time, the horizontal velocity should be reduced continuously. It is relatively dicult to achieve large angle maneuver only by feedback controller in short time, therefore it is necessary to add a feedforward controller to accelerate the convergence process. (3) Hovering and hazard avoidance. In order to keep the spacecraft hovering, the impulse modulation mode needs to be applied to adjust thrust if assembled constant thrust engine is used in the spacecraft. Attitude stabilization should be kept by 10 N attitude thruster. Lunar imaging sensor should be ensured to operate normally. Lunar imaging sensor in the state of hovering is used to acquire the information of lunar altitude and images. GNC computer will detect hazard and choose safe landing zone based on the information. The 4 150 N thruster is used to perform horizontal movement to avoid hazard. (4) Terminal landing. The lander will perform soft landing on the moon in vertical attitude. The safety and reliability of landing are the basis for the guidance process. Gravity turning guidance is applied to reduce the velocity. For constant thrust engine, the guidance process of terminal landing phase is a kind of Bang-Bang control. Attitude control is achieved by a 150 N thruster. Attitude determination is achieved by gyro prediction. Autonomous navigation performed by IMU is used along with velocity and distance correction.

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4. Autonomous navigation and guidance method for soft lunar landing For GNC system design of the lander, the design of attitude measurement and control could be referred to the related design of former earth satellite. Orbit measurement and control need to be autonomously performed by the lander because of the specic characteristics of soft lunar landing; therefore, there are some new features in orbit measurement and control design. 4.1. Autonomous navigation method for soft lunar landing (Wang et al., in press) Usually IMU is the navigation sensor that is used in the whole process of soft lunar landing. Since the accumulation of initial navigation error and IMU measurement error will cause the gradual increase of navigation error, it is necessary to use external navigation sensor for correction to increase navigation accuracy. The relatively feasible autonomous navigation mode for lunar soft landing is adopting IMU as the main navigation sensor with correction for IMU navigation results by making use of external measurement information of velocity/distance. At certain epoch, the thrust acceleration of the lander is measured by accelerometer. Attitude angular velocity is measured by gyro. The initial orbit is predicted onboard by using the orbit data injected by deep space networks in advance. The initial value of attitude could be provided by other attitude sensors before landing on the moon. In this way, the position, velocity and attitude of the lander could be integrated by using the real-time measurement information provided by IMU and the initial value of orbit and attitude. When velocimeter and altimeter are able to go into operation, the distance and velocity information is used to correct the IMU navigation results. The specic realization process of autonomous navigation for soft lunar landing is shown in Fig. 4. The detailed analysis and simulation results on the presented autonomous navigation method are shown in Wang et al. (in press). Here some conclusions are given as follows. It is impossible to well correct position error only by using the velocity measurement. Distance information mainly

provides the position correction for IMU with small velocity correction; therefore, velocity and distance information are needed to be used simultaneously to update IMU. Since the distance information used is radial (selenocenter pointed) altitude information (or line-of-sight distance), it is not sensitive to lateral position drift. Therefore, distance information could not be used to correct lateral position error. So the expected position of landing site should be selected in the initial landing plane. The navigation accuracy achieved by introducing velocity and distance information from 10 km altitude above lunar surface is relatively high, better than the navigation accuracy introduced from the beginning of powered descent. This is mainly caused by the relatively serious measurement errors of velocimeter and altimeter during the initial powered descent phase. 4.2. Autonomous guidance method for lunar soft landing The requirements for lunar soft landing guidance are as follows: (a) optimal/sub-optimal fuel; (b) robustness; (c) autonomy; (d) real-time. Since there are great dierences between motion features of each soft lunar landing phase, the dierent guidance methods need to be used in each phase. Powered descent phase adopts an explicit guidance method. This is because landing fuel consumption caused by the explicit guidance method is almost the same to that in optimal guidance process, which is a kind of sub-optimal fuel consumption guidance law. Compared to the nominal trajectory method, the explicit guidance method is not aected by the initial navigation error. It can achieve the high landing accuracy. There are two dierent explicit guidance methods respectively used for the constant thrust engine and the throttleable thrust engine. (1) Assembled constant thrust explicit guidance (Wang and Li, 2000). Depending on the present state parameters of the spacecraft, two thrust angles as the control element and their expressions can be computed as follows according to geometrical relationship between each acceleration vector and velocity vector with the base of optimal/sub-optimal fuel consumption.

initial orbit initial attitude

accelerometers gyros attitude

IMU equations

orbit

orbit EKF

R, V

velometer altimeter

3 radical velocities line of sight distance

velocity altitude

Fig. 4. Autonomous navigation of velocity and distance-updated IMU navigation.

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cos w  a l=r2 v2 w2 =r=aF ; q cos / vf v= vf v2 wf w2  a 2b2 6rf r 2uf 2uT go =T 2 go ; q 2 2 tgo vf v wf w =aH

8 a 0 ln1 m T h k m > a > 0 > > < 2 1 kT 2 gT vf T ; a > v k ln1 m T > > 0 > : gT vf

r h h f h; v v 2a b a a 5

2
a2

a is radial accelerawhere aF is thrust acceleration,  tion, and aH is the horizontal component of thrust acceleration. The other denotations without denition are shown in Wang and Li (2000). It is just related to the state of the spacecraft and terminal constraint without the requirement for superposition calculation. It is a kind of sub-optimal closed-loop real-time guidance method easy to be achieved. (2) Throttleable thrust explicit guidance method (Huang et al., 2006) It is a quadratic optimal guidance law used for directing soft landing at a specic lunar target. The thrust of the engine and the explicit expression of the direction angle could be directly calculated according to the present state parameters of the lander without any iterative calculation. The specic process is: (a) Calculate the control variants m  a 4 v=tgo 6 r  r t =t 2 go g 3

. The other where a 1 a k g , b 1 k, T h 2 m0 2 m2 a 0 denotations without denition are shown in Wang et al. (2002).The detailed analysis and simulation results on the presented guidance methods are shown in Wang and Li (2000), Huang et al. (2006) and Wang et al. (2002), respectively.

4.3. Hazard detection and avoidance maneuver 4.3.1. Hazard detection Lunar imaging sensor could provide the altitude information of the sucient density points in lunar surface. Suppose the area required by the spacecraft for safe landing is S. The initial scheme for the choice of landing zone is using S as the measurement unit, starting the search from the present landing site, and judging whether the safe landing conditions the convex height in landing zone being less than 20 cm and the slope in landing zone being equal to or less than 8 are met, until the safe landing zone is found. Visible imaging sensor could estimate the smoothest zone as a starting point for searching the landing zones based on the distribution of light and shadow of images. The hazards in image show the local light changes along with shadows. According to this feature, image processing algorithm could be designed to divide the image. When there are laps between the divided zone and the S zone of one step, the next S zone will be directly searched without the necessity to judge safe landing conditions. In this way, the search speed could be improved. 4.3.2. Hazard avoidance maneuver Horizontal hazard avoidance is performed according to the sites of safe landing zones determined by hazard detection. In order to guarantee the accuracy of arrival at the safe landing zone and reduce the maneuver time at the same time, horizontal displacement control could be divided into two phases. The rst phase is the open-loop control using Bang-Bang control. Four horizontal maneuvering engines will be started in certain sequence and time based on the positions of landing sites to make the spacecraft arrive at the given landing site rapidly. The second phase is a closed-loop control, which adopts phase plane control algorithm to introduce the real-time navigation information of lunar imaging sensor to the close loop. In this way, the accuracy of arrival at the given safe landing site will be improved. If the information provided by lunar imaging sensor after the rst phase shows the present landing site is safe, it is not necessary to perform the second phase control.

where  r and  v are respectively the position and velocm is ity of the lander,  rt is the position of landing site, g the local lunar gravitational acceleration, tgo is the time from present to landing terminal; (b) calculate the thrust acceleration a; (c) calculate the required ^ by using the estimated mass of the thrust F ma ^ . The mass of the lander m ^ F =am could lander m be estimated according to the applied thrust F and the measured acceleration am; (d) transform the calculated thrust acceleration  a (landing coordinate system) to orbit coordinate system as [aox aoy aoz]; (e) calculate the commanded thrust angles w arccosaox =a; / arctanaoz =aoy 4

Terminal landing phase adopts the gravity turn guidance method (Wang et al., 2002). Because it is impossible to keep the spacecraft attitude strictly vertical to lunar surface and the horizontal velocity will not be zero, gravity turn guidance is used to ensure the safety of landing. The basic thought of gravity turn soft landing guidance is to keep the direction of braking thrust and the opposite direction of the spacecraft velocity vector in the same direction through attitude control system and to conduct brake velocity reduction, so that realizing vertical soft landing on lunar surface. The ring moment and time of brake engine are determined according to the velocity information of the present position and the velocity information of the terminal position. Its switching function expression is

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5. Conclusions A pinpoint autonomous GNC system scheme for lunar soft landing has been presented and analyzed. We mainly pay attention to the following key problems: (a) the analysis and research on autonomous navigation, autonomous guidance, hazard detection and avoidance maneuver for lunar soft landing; (b) the analysis of the GNC operation modes and the landing sensors such as velocimeter, altimeter and lunar imaging sensor. Through our research, we have drawn some conclusions. The autonomous navigation based on measurement-updated IMU for lunar soft landing is feasible. The presented explicit guidance method or throttleable thrust explicit guidance method can be adopted in the powered descent phase. The gravity turn guidance can be adopted in the terminal landing phase. A three-dimensional imaging senor and a visible imaging sen-

sor can be combined for the faster hazard detection. Hazard avoidance maneuver can be performed by the openloop control and the closed-loop control. Landing errors are conrmed by the initial orbit determination error, navigation measurement noise, actuator error, etc. References
Huang, X.Y., Wang, D.Y., Guan, Y.F. A linear quadratic optimal guidance method for lunar soft landing. Aerospace Control 24 (6), 11 16, 2006. Wang, D.Y., Li, T.S. Explicit guidance control for lunar soft landing. High Technology Letters 7 (10), 8891, 2000. Wang, D.Y., Li, T.S., Ma, X.R. Optimal guidance for lunar gravity-turn descent. Acta Automatica Sinica 28 (3), 385390, 2002. Wang, D.Y., Huang, X.Y., Guan, Y.F., in press. Research on the autonomous navigation based on measurement-updated IMU for lunar soft landing. Journal of Astronautics.