Test camera

ESA’s Navigation for Planetary Approach and Landing (NPAL) navigation camera was tested for use with the Asteroid Impact Mission at GMV in Madrid, Spain, during autumn 2015. The camera took images for the processing software to first select landmark ‘feature points’ within the field of view and then to follow them from frame to frame. The camera itself has a detector that acquires the images, a ‘frame store’ for their intermediate storage and an image-processing chip to perform the feature tracking, before providing the information to AIM’s guidance and navigation computer. Changing tracks of the various feature points over time are checked against the onward and rotational motion of the spacecraft to determine its position and orientation.