The backpack will use a sophisticated navigation algorithm to map out lunar terrain—and without the benefit of GPS.
NASA Planetary Scientist Michael Zanetti testing out the backpack in Potrillo volcanic field in New Mexico.The Moon is not the kind of place where you want to get lost, but it can get a little tricky trying to retrace your dusty footsteps without a GPS system in place. Thankfully, space engineers may have found a way around this limitation, designing a portable backpack meant to generate a real-time, 3D map of the Moon’s terrain.
explored south polar regions of the Moon. KNaCK allows for an on-demand, real-time navigation system, and it works by using a pulsed laser that measures distances to nearby objects and surface features.
The backpack combines real-time high-definition video imaging, as seen in the upper left panel, lidar ranging data, seen in the upper right panel, and lidar velocity data.“Basically, the sensor is a surveying tool for both navigation and science mapping, able to create ultra-high-resolution 3D maps at centimeter-level precision and give them a rich scientific context,” Michael Zanetti, who leads the KNaCK project at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, said in a.
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