In the future, China will carry out a series of deep space exploration activities, including the fourth phase of the lunar exploration project, Mars sample return mission, and asteroid exploration. The soft-landing process faces new challenges such as more complex environments, unknown terrains, and tighter time constraints. Optical sensors provide sequence images containing rich landmark features such as rocks and craters on celestial bodies, making them an ideal source of information for autonomous navigation during soft landings. However, due to limited computing resources on deep space probes, processing a large amount of image information is not feasible. It is necessary to select the abundant landmark features in the sequence images. Traditionally, landmark selection is based on observability analysis, quantifying the contribution of landmark features to navigation accuracy. However, traditional methods observe only locally optimal landmarks at single moments, and the observability gradually decreases with multiple consecutive observations of the same landmark, affecting navigation accuracy. This paper first establishes a model of autonomous navigation system based on sequential image observability in planetary landing phase, constructs an observability index for multiple observations of sequential images, proves its convex function property, and provides the interval where the minimum value point lies, guiding the selection of landmarks with the highest observability at multiple moments. Through mathematical simulation verification, landmark selection based on sequential image observability achieves higher navigation accuracy than traditional single-moment selection methods, providing theoretical support for autonomous navigation based on sequential images during the landing phase of deep space exploration missions.
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