Speaker
Description
The Mars 2020 mission revolutionized planetary exploration by introducing the first extraterrestrial rotorcraft – Ingenuity. While orbiters provide essential global context and rovers offer highly localized surface observations, a scale gap has persisted in Martian terrain mapping. This presentation demonstrates how low-altitude rotorcraft imagery can successfully bridge this gap, delivering topographic data of unprecedented detail.
We present the results of a novel georeferenced Structure-from-Motion (SfM) workflow specifically designed to process Ingenuity's NavCam imagery using navigation telemetry. Applied to flights over Jezero crater, our methodology yields GIS-ready orthomosaics and Digital Terrain Models (DTMs) with a resolution of approximately 3–4 cm. These sub-decimeter products are generated in a global Martian reference frame and offer a level of detail roughly an order of magnitude finer than the highest-resolution orbital data, such as those from HiRISE. To overcome the absence of ground control points, we detail how fusing flight telemetry with orbital refinements ensures high internal and external accuracy in our SfM workflow.
Finally, we discuss the transformative potential of these high-resolution datasets for planetary geomorphology. Furthermore, our results prove that rotorcraft platforms can rapidly map areas inaccessible to rovers, opening new avenues for future robotic exploration and providing openly accessible data for the broader scientific community.