Determining orbit from earth and moon surface pictures taken by cosmonauts

Lunar exploration is one of the major tasks of the next few decades for the leading spacefaring nations. Some of the tasks of the planned Lunar program can be practiced within the framework of the ISS project. One of them, dealing with the developmental testing of techniques for determining a spacecraft orbit from pictures of the planetary surface, is discussed in this paper. The paper describes procedural aspects involved in solving this problem and provides examples of developmental testing of the proposed autonomous navigation technique using pictures of Earth taken from onboard the ISS Russian Segment. Using pictures taken by USА astronauts through the window of the lunar orbital module, it also demonstrates the viability of using the proposed technique for determining orbit from pictures of the lunar surface.