Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by foobarbecue 1358 days ago
Yes... there are similar frames for Mars and other bodies. A good intro: https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/naif/toolkit_docs/Tutorials/pd...

For the rover, we're pretty much always dealing in local coordinate systems based on reference frames defined using the rover's observations of the sun and alignment of local imagery with orbital imagery. The two frames used most frequently are called RNAV (centered on the rover) and SITE (centered on where we last did a sun observation). But then there is a tree of frame transformations for knowing the location and orientation of each part of the rover with a lot of named frames (especially important for operating the robotic arm, which I also do).