![]() “The key is hardening it, and that’s something we’re working with NASA and their partners on.” FMCW allows us to get the performance we need, here or anywhere else,” said Aeva CEO Soroush Salehian. “There’s no need to change the wavelengths or spectrum or anything like that. The lack of atmosphere does change some things a bit, but for the most part it’s more about making sure the tech can do its thing safely. ![]() Luckily, light works the same, for the most part anyway, on the moon as it does here on Earth. This, as well as its use of frequency-modulated continuous wave tech instead of flash or other lidar methods, means it is robust to interference from bright sunlight. So when it scans a street, it knows that one shape is moving towards it at 30 MPH, while another is moving away at five MPH and others are standing still relative to the sensor’s own movement. That’s what NASA on for the last couple years, funded through the Space Technology Mission Directorate’s “Early Career Initiative,” which since its launch in 2019 aims to “Invigorate NASA’s technological base and best practices by partnering early career NASA leaders with world class external innovators.” In this case that innovator is Aeva, which is better known for its automotive lidar and perception systems.Īeva has an advantage over many such systems in the fact that its lidar, in addition to capturing the range of a given point, will also capture its velocity vector. What NASA was looking for, however, was a unit small enough to be mounted on an astronaut’s backpack or to a rover, yet capable of scanning the terrain and producing a detailed map in real time - and determining exactly where it was in it.Ĭoncept image of a backpack-mounted lidar. Lidar provides an option for mapping even in darkness or bright sunlight, and it’s already used in landers and other instruments for this purpose. ![]() This area is a target for lunar operations due to a good deal of water below the surface, but we just don’t have a good idea of what the surface looks like in detail. For example, at the south pole of the moon, the fixed angle of the sun results in there being deep shadows that are never illuminated and brightly baked highlights that you need to careful how you look at. ![]() ![]() This is necessary because for now, we have no GPS-type tech on the moon, Mars or any other planet, and although we have high-resolution imagery of the surface from orbit, that’s not always enough to navigate by. The project is called KNaCK, or Kinematic Navigation and Cartography Knapsack, and it’s meant to act as a sort of hyperaccurate dead reckoning system based on simultaneous location and mapping (SLAM) concepts. Without GPS, navigation and mapping is a lot harder - and NASA is working with lidar company Aeva to create a tool that scans the terrain when ordinary cameras and satellite instruments won’t cut it. As humanity prepares to return to the moon (“to stay,” as they remind us constantly), there’s a lot of infrastructure that needs to be built to make sure astronauts are safe and productive on the lunar surface. ![]()
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