Tracking Particles Ejected From Active Asteroid Bennu With Event-Based
  Vision
Loïc J. Azzalini Dario Izzo
Early detection and tracking of ejecta in the vicinity of small solar system
bodies is crucial to guarantee spacecraft safety and support scientific
observation. During the visit of active asteroid Bennu, the OSIRIS-REx
spacecraft relied on the analysis of images captured by onboard navigation
cameras to detect particle ejection events, which ultimately became one of the
mission's scientific highlights. To increase the scientific return of similar
time-constrained missions, this work proposes an event-based solution that is
dedicated to the detection and tracking of centimetre-sized particles. Unlike a
standard frame-based camera, the pixels of an event-based camera independently
trigger events indicating whether the scene brightness has increased or
decreased at that time and location in the sensor plane. As a result of the
sparse and asynchronous spatiotemporal output, event cameras combine very high
dynamic range and temporal resolution with low-power consumption, which could
complement existing onboard imaging techniques. This paper motivates the use of
a scientific event camera by reconstructing the particle ejection episodes
reported by the OSIRIS-REx mission in a photorealistic scene generator and in
turn, simulating event-based observations. The resulting streams of
spatiotemporal data support future work on event-based multi-object tracking.