SISPO: Space Imaging Simulator for Proximity Operations

Abstract

This paper describes the architecture and demonstrates the capabilities of a newly developed, physically-based imaging simulator environment called SISPO, developed for small solar system body fly-by and terrestrial planet surface mission simulations. The image simulator utilises the open-source 3-D visualisation system Blender and its Cycles rendering engine, which supports physically based rendering capabilities and procedural micropolygon displacement texture generation. The simulator concentrates on realistic surface rendering and has supplementary models to produce realistic dust- and gas-environment optical models for comets and active asteroids. The framework also includes tools to simulate the most common image aberrations, such as tangential and sagittal astigmatism, internal and external comatic aberration, and simple geometric distortions. The model framework’s primary objective is to support small-body space mission design by allowing better simulations for characterisation of imaging instrument performance, assisting mission planning, and developing computer-vision algorithms. SISPO allows the simulation of trajectories, light parameters and camera’s intrinsic parameters.

Space Situational Awareness: Conjunction-based Collision Analysis Among Debris and Active Assets in Space

“…A spacecraft proximity operations guidance strategy that utilizes deep reinforcement learning, a subfield of artificial intelligence is discussed in [14]. The examination of simulation software called SISPO, has been specifically developed for proximity operations and serves as a tool for visualizing the space environment in [15] with features for simulating the orbital path, light conditions, and the intrinsic camera parameters. The experiments conducted in February 2020 [16,17], in which two spacecraft successfully carried out the inaugural commercial satellite-servicing rendezvous and docking in Geo-stationary Earth Orbit (GEO), provided an exceptional chance to analyze the dynamics of the involved vehicles.…”

Electric Sail Test Cube–Lunar Nanospacecraft, ESTCube-LuNa: Solar Wind Propulsion Demonstration Mission Concept

“…The regular mission design tools, such as STK and GMAT, do not include photorealistic 3D capabilities, which in turn are necessary to model and develop optical navigation and attitude estimation, available in blender-based environments, such as SISPO [53], FlyBy-Gen [54] and AIS [55]. Furthermore, open-loop control, which takes advantage of optical measurements, requires real-time 3D modelling.…”

Tracking particles ejected from active asteroid Bennu with event-based vision

“…from 2019-09-13T21:00:00 to 2019-09-14T00:00:00 [12] Given the dynamic nature of the event camera, the ejection scene depicted in Figure 2 is then animated in Blender, using photorealistic models of the asteroid and the particles. Different textures and reflectance properties are used to reproduce the rubble pile appearance of Bennu [13] based on the position of the Sun during the Orbital C phase. The simulated ejecta consists of 14 particles with sizes ranging from 1 − 11 𝑐𝑐𝑐𝑐 according to the average diameters reported in [1].…”

“…To support the evaluation of event-based multi-particle tracking, we use the navigation and ancillary information of the OSIRIS-REx mission in simulation as well as reports of notable particle ejection episodes [12] to highlight how an event-based sensor can augment visual data capture and contribute to the mission's scientific objectives. The dynamic scene, composed of asteroid Bennu and several centimetre-size particles ejected from its surface, is first reconstructed with photorealistic computer graphics tools from the point of view of the visiting spacecraft [13]. Dynamic vision sensing is subsequently simulated by emulating the sensitivity and noise characteristics of a real event camera [14,15].…”