NASA Trajectory Reconstruction

The Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID) was a NASA mission to test an experimental heatshield for use on Mars. During the test, the instrumentation to record LOFTID’s trajectory broke, making analysis of the mission very difficult. I invented a system to reconstruct the trajectory of the LOFTID mission using videos from on-board cameras of the Earth and Moon. The system used computer vision algorithms, live orbital tracking of the Earth and Moon, and a custom-built Kalman filter to synthesize the camera and orbital data into a reconstructed trajectory.

Here is a presentation where I explain each step of the process. Take a look!

In progress: Write up the content of the above presentation, include images and videos from the computer vision pipeline.