Case Study: KinetX accelerates high-accuracy optical navigation for NASA missions with MathWorks MATLAB

Developing Optical Navigation Software for NASA’s New Horizons, OSIRIS-REx, and Lucy Missions

KinetX Aerospace, a key navigation provider for NASA deep space missions, faced the challenge of rapidly developing highly accurate optical navigation (OpNav) software for the New Horizons, OSIRIS-REx, and Lucy missions. Their small team needed to create complex image processing algorithms without building low-level routines from scratch and required the ability to quickly implement changes as new mission data arrived. To meet this challenge, they partnered with MathWorks and utilized MATLAB, along with its Image Processing, Optimization, Parallel Computing, and Statistics and Machine Learning Toolboxes.

By leveraging MathWorks products, the KinetX team developed the KXIMP software suite in MATLAB. This solution processed spacecraft images to determine inertial camera attitude and calculate centroids of celestial bodies with extreme precision; on the OSIRIS-REx mission, center-finding accuracy was within 30 centimeters. The use of MATLAB’s toolboxes accelerated algorithm development and debugging, which was crucial for last-minute adjustments. Furthermore, MathWorks MATLAB Coder was used to generate C code for autonomous onboard navigation, successfully tested on the LunaH-Map mission, paving the way for future deep space exploration with minimal ground support.

KinetX

Coralie Adam

KinetX