Goddard Image Analysis and Navigation Tool(GSC-19381-1)

The Goddard Image Analysis and Navigation Tool (GIANT) is an optical navigation (OpNav) tool suite for generating precision navigation products from images for use in orbit determination (OD) tools. Optical Navigation measurements provide highly accurate relative information between a spacecraft and a celestial body that enables science and engineering tasks which are unattainable using traditional radiometric tracking techniques alone. As mission concepts become more advanced, optical navigation will continue to become a necessary component of the navigation toolbox. GIANT is being developed and maintained to provide a single simple interface for generating these products that is OD software and mission agnostic. It has been successfully used throughout OSIRIS-REx proximity operations as well as for mission planning for OSIRIS-APEx and other mission concepts. GIANT was designed from the ground up to make precision OpNav easy and fast. It provides efficient implementations of the current state-of-the-art OpNav techniques while maintaining extensibility to allow easy addition of future techniques. In addition, GIANT is written in the Python interpreted language, making the code accessible and the routines easy to understand. GIANT can perform numerous types of OpNav, including optical camera calibration, attitude estimation, relative navigation with respect to an unresolved body, relative navigation with respect to a resolved body, opportunistic feature matching between images, surface feature navigation, surface coverage analysis, and autonomous detection and tracking of particles in monocular images. It is capable of observing multiple bodies in a single image and makes use of an efficient and flexible ray tracer. GIANT is being continuously developed to maintain the ability to utilize the state-of-the-art OpNav techniques. Version 2.0 of GIANT adds novel capabilities to the GIANT software library, including a redesigned ray tracer able to make use of certain GPU hardware, a new visual odometry measurement capability, novel TRN measurement techniques, improved coverage analysis tools, and improved documentation and tutorials.