It is nice to see even a small dream realized! Our Funded NASA SBIR project: Automatic Solar and Celestial Navigation on the Moon and Mars‏, is now covered by its official paperwork!

This effort taps decades of work we have done with high precision optical measurements and image analysis, and our work towards space applications of these technologies. Our professional products in this area use what we call an “Imaging Microphotometer” to emphasize the quality we obtain from each of the sensor Pixels. We have, however, managed to approximate this performance with more common, high resolution image sensors, including fraction of a gram mass sensor units.

The NASA work of course has direct application for both manned and unmanned exploration of the Moon, including our Google Lunar X PRIZE (GLXP) efforts. These sensors can verify the relocation required by the GLXP contest rules. Even more important, they will provide a very high resolution location for any and all interesting features found by one of our Lunar Rover/Prospector systems. (We have prototyped enhancements to the proposed NASA system which can push surface position accuracy to less than a meter!)

Some of our early comments noted that our “Stand Up” lander configuration can easily incorporate an automated core drilling system. Using just 3% of the landed mass as propellant, our unit can “Hop” and re-land with 500 meter displacement. (1% propellant allows 55 meter displacement.)Thus dozens of test holes can be analyzed in an interesting lunar field.

Related technology has already been evaluated for “Planetary/Star Cameras” to compute desired interplanetary and trans-lunar “mid course corrections” and guide Lunar and Planetary capture plus orbital insertion. A variant of that technology would be used for altitude determination before our prototyped LIDAR system began providing good Lunar Altitude information during descent.

We don't yet have a “Ticket to Orbit” (even for the 100 km mass in LEO we expect to use to win the Google Prize), but we have many of the pieces necessary to go the rest of the way!