ARGUS // where on Earth?

A spacecraft that knows where it is by looking

Argus is a small satellite whose camera looks down at Earth. To work out its own orbit, it needs to know exactly what ground it is looking at: which pixels sit on which latitude and longitude. Those tie points go straight into orbit determination.

The old approach was closed-set: a classifier guesses a region, then landmark detectors hunt for features they were trained on. If it sees something new, it still guesses, and the wrong answer slides quietly into the orbit solution.

This project swaps that for an open-set, retrieve-then-match pipeline:

• Retrieve: a fine-tuned DINOv2 + SALAD network turns the frame into one descriptor and pulls the 15 most similar tiles out of a map of hundreds of thousands.
• Match: SIFT + LightGlue lines up actual features, and RANSAC keeps the geometry that holds together.
• Verify: fewer than 30 inliers means it refuses to answer. A frame with no answer is safer for orbit determination than a confident wrong one.

Every result on this site is a real output of that pipeline, run on the lab GPU and replayed here. The astronaut photos are harder than the real job: handheld, oblique, and rotated. Argus's own camera points much closer to straight down.