Toward an Autonomous Feature-based Pointing System for Planetary Missions

Although the analytical groundwork for understanding two-dimensional object images and various aspects of computer vision has been laid, we have not yet applied these concepts to automating the process of obtaining science images during space exploration missions. Our current approach in specifying pointing-command sequences relies heavily on target predicts, based on predicted target and spacecraft ephemerides, that propagate the target position as a function of time during pointing operations.