57th International Astronautical Congress

ESA is planning a series of robotic missions to Mars, the safe delivery of which will be greatly assisted by landing systems capable of autonomous navigation and hazard detection and avoidance. Vision-based navigation is a promising technique which is currently being developed by ESA. The testing of vision-based navigation systems can benefit from computer-based planet surface simulations representative of the target planetary body. PANGU (Planet and Asteroid Natural Scene Generation Utility) is a software tool for simulating and visualising the surface of various planetary bodies. PANGU builds a planet surface model starting with a predefined surface or a fractal surface generated by PANGU. Craters are placed…