LIDAR based terrain slope detection on fractal based lunar surface modeling

On the second phase of China Lunar Exploration Project, in order to proceed a safe soft landing on the moon, a reliable hazard detection system must be developed. As a active detection sensor, light detection and ranging (LIDAR) was well developed in recent years, which has a high pixel resolution and high range resolution. A terrain slope detection method will be proposed in this paper. A simulation was taken on a high-resolution lunar surface model, which was generated from low-resolution lunar control network by a fractal based method. The results showed that LIDAR slope detection was dependable for soft landing on the moon, which was not influenced by illumination conditions.