Safe Mars landing strategy: Towards lidar-based high altitude hazard detection

This paper presents a high-altitude hazard detection method for Mars landing. Current terminal-triggered methods do not fully support re-targeting maneuvers if all regions are found unsafe. Towards safe landing requirements for future missions, hazard detection should be triggered as soon as possible. We therefore proposed a lidar-based high altitude hazard detection approach, consisting of two main procedures: Terrain reconstruction and Hazard mapping. Morphological filters are first carried out to remove outliers. An interpolation-based terrain reconstruction algorithm is then proposed to model the datum surface of landing region. For hazard mapping, an innovative hazard assessment function is proposed to generate a continuous hazard map that with full hazard information. The new approach is simple but well-performed, and only few parameters are needed. Both synthetic and real data are used to validate the detection performance, and preliminary results show the superiority of the proposed algorithms compared with current plane-based hazard detectors.