Mission study for interplanetary small-sats in support of the navigation of Martian rovers. Image processing and path planning on synthetic and real images.

The aim of the Master Thesis is to develop a mission for interplanetary small-sats in support of the navigation of Martian rovers in the scope of the SINAV Project, sponsored by Italian Space Agency. The objective of SINAV Project is the development of High-Speed Autonomous Navigation Systems for future missions of robotic planetary exploration. In particular, the scientific-technological objectives and requirements that characterize this type of mission have been identified. Some mission architectures have also been defined and through trade-off it has been possible to identify the best architecture. This work presents an analysis of COTS components that can be used as optical payloads that meet mission requirements and that can be integrated into a small-sized structure that characterizes small-satellites. The thesis also proposes an analysis on the use of Raspberry Pi 4 single-board and Raspberry cameras as representative elements of an optical payload in a small-satellite prototype to be used in the test phases. In the second part of the thesis work we focused on the processing of synthetic images, provided by Thales Alenia Space, and real ones, acquired on the reconstructed Martian terrain, at the ALTEC/TASI facility. The processing subsequently led to the verification of the feasibility of applying the path planning algorithm on the processed images. In test phase, in order to generate the paths on synthetic and real images RRT algorithm is used.