NASA Development Strategy for Navigation Technologies to Precisely Land Payloads and Avoid Landing Hazards

Precise and safe landing capabilities have become high priority for future NASA human and robotic missions destined for surface exploration of the Moon, Mars and beyond. The development of a NASA strategy to enable, infuse, and ultimately commercialize the capabilities for public and private spaceflight is a focus of the NASA Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL) community across multiple NASA mission directorates. The EDL strategy seeks to develop GN&C (Guidance, Navigation and Control) technologies within the domain area known as Precision Landing and Hazard Avoidance (PL&HA) to enable anytime and anywhere global and safe access to exploration destinations, including in treacherous terrains and independent of lighting conditions. The envisioned capabilities include highly-controllable entry systems, terrain relative navigation, high-resolution surface hazard imaging, precise velocity and range sensing, mitigations for plume-surface interactions, advanced algorithms, and dedicated PL&HA computing. The goal for these capabilities is to enable precise and safe landing that at the mission level reduces the risks associated with the landing, the subsequent surface operations time to reach exploration sites, and the aggregation of surface assets.