‘ELOPE’ with ESA’s moon landing guidance competition

The ACT is ESA’s multidisciplinary think tank, focusing on emerging technologies and exploring new concepts and methods.

“20 May will mark the start of our newest competition, run through the ACT’s Kelvins website, a portal dedicated to hosting public aerospace challenges,” announces Dario Izzo, ACT’s scientific coordinator.

In this Event-based Lunar OPtical flow for Egomotion estimation (ELOPE) challenge, researchers and space enthusiasts alike are asked to reconstruct an imaginary lunar lander’s descent trajectory.

The participants will not be given any images, GPS data, or information about the landing site – only unprocessed simulated data from an event camera, an imaging sensor that responds to changes in brightness.

ACT’s Pietro Fanti explains: “Instead of capturing colour images using the RGB (red, green, and blue) channels like traditional cameras, an event camera records changes in brightness intensity for each pixel.

“This allows us to capture data at a very high speed and even in challenging lighting conditions, such as scenes with very bright or very dark areas. In addition, the sensor has lower power consumption when compared to conventional cameras.”

Dario adds: “These qualities make event cameras a great tool for navigation during Moon landings. To explore this application, we have generated a large number of landing trajectories, and then we simulated the event data that an event camera fixed to a lunar lander would capture in that situation. Now we are asking the community to navigate our imaginary spacecraft through a safe, highly precise landing.”

“To generate data for this project, we used PANGU – a space video simulations software developed for ESA by the University of Dundee,” says ACT’s Leon Williams. “These simulated videos were then converted into event streams using video2events software made by ETH Zürich.”

The ELOPE competition is a collaboration between ESA’s Advanced Concepts Team, the University of Adelaide and Delft University of Technology. The datasets and competition rules will be made available on 20 May 2025 through the competition website. Participation is free and open to everyone, and all submissions will be scored automatically on the platform.

“This challenge is, just like the ones we hosted previously, open to space enthusiasts from all over the world,” Leon notes. “The Kelvins competition initiative exemplifies how strategic engagement with the global scientific community can accelerate the development of innovative solutions to complex space challenges.”