The future of space exploration will involve cooperating fleets of spacecraft or sensor webs geared towards coordinated and optimal observation of Earth Science phenomena.  The main advantage of such systems is to utilize multiple viewing angles as well as multiple spatial and spectral resolutions of sensors carried on multiple spacecraft but spacecraft but acting collaboratively as a single system.  Within this framework, our research focuses on all areas related to sensing in collaborative environments, which means systems utilizing intra-communicating spatially distributed sensor pods or crafts being deployed to monitor or explore different environments.  Examples of such collaborative environments are found: in Earth Science with such concepts as spacecraft constellations or sensor webs of satellite, aircraft and in-situ simultaneous measurements; in Space Science with fleets of nano-satellites or deployable mirrors/telescopes; and in Explo9ration, for which the coordination between one or several

·          in Earth Science with such concepts as spacecraft constellations or sensor webs of satellite, aircraft and in-situ simultaneous measurements.

·          in Space Science with fleets of nano-satellites or deployable mirrors/telescopes, and

·          in Exploration, for which the coordination between one or several orbiters and multiple planetary explorers, including humans and robots, will be essential.

This talk will describe the general concept of sensing in collaborative environments, will give brief overview of several technologies developed at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in this area, and then will concentrate on specific image processing research related to that domain, specifically image registration and image fusion.

 Dr. Moigne is Head of the Advanced Architectures and Automation Branch of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, as well as a NASA Goddard Senior Fellow.  She received a B.S. and a M.S. in Mathematics and a Ph.D. in Computer Science (specialty: Computer Vision) from the University of Pierre and Marie Curie, Paris, .  As an Assistant Research Scientist at the Computer Vision Laboratory of the University of Maryland , Dr. Moigne designed new algorithms and supervised the development of a visual navigation system for the Autonomous Land Vehicle (ALV) project.