Design and Implementation of Optical Signature Simulator for Deep Space Exploration Autonomous Navigation

An optical signature simulator was proposed and developed for simulations and ground experiments of optical-based autonomous navigation sensors for deep space exploration.The simulator is mainly composed of high-class graphic workstation, high-resolution LCD monitor and optical collimator.The positions and optical characters of the signature sources such as stars, planets and asteroids in deep space are calculated by software firstly.Then, the 3d scenes including all illuminant celestial bodies in deep space are rebuilt using OpenGL and project to the LCD monitor.Finally, an optical collimator is applied to construct analog parallel signatures.The experiments show that the simulator is simple and efficient, and can be applied in simulations and experiments of optical navigation sensor for deep space explorations.