NaviGadget

LASOIS

Jul 28, 2008 gps navigation

LASOIS. That’s the GPS system for the moon. It stands for Lunar Astronaut Spatial Orientation and Information System.

As you may already know we’re planning to go back to the moon by 2020 and it looks like this time we want to have a sense of orientation when up there instead of just jumping around aimlessly. The idea is to improve safety of the astronauts and help them accomplish their missions more efficiently without running of oxygen.

The architecture will be established based on an integrated sensor network made up of orbital, lunar-surface, vehicle on-board, and on-suit sensors. Orbital sensors include navigation, communication and reconnaissance satellites in orbit around the Moon. These include the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) and a Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) which will be deployed in lunar orbit.

Lunar surface sensors will include surface beacons pre-deployed on the lunar surface. This beacon system will use radio frequency, microwave, ultrasonic or visible light sources to transmit the relative positioning between any object and known active surface beacon reference points. On-board vehicle sensors (wheel odometers, engineering navigation cameras) will be mounted on any roving vehicles or robots. Onsuit sensors will be mounted on the astronaut’s space suit. Light-weight stereo cameras can be mounted on the helmet and will provide real-time visual information used to generate navigation and localization capabilities. A user-friendly interface will be mounted on the astronauts’ arm to provide display functions for 2D and 3D spatial information along with any necessary
simple interaction functions.

It is quite funny actually they used a Garmin Nuvi as a stand-in for the actual interface for the astronauts in their conference paper (pdf). Will Garmin Nuvi will really be the first navigation system to be used in space?