Evaluating Map Fidelity Under Flight-Like Power Envelopes

Flight-like power envelopes force a fidelity decision most analog teams never formalize. A duty-cycled quilt benchmark puts point-cloud residual on the wattage curve.

A flight-class planetary cave mission has to ship a mapping instrument inside a power envelope that is not negotiable once the spacecraft is built. The NASA Small Spacecraft State-of-the-Art survey of power subsystems lays out baseline power budgets for flight-class vehicles, and the NASA Science Basics of Space Flight chapter on onboard systems sets the broader bookends: 300 W for a small spacecraft, 2.5 kW for a larger flagship, with the instrument slice of that budget typically well under 10 percent. A cave-mapping payload that wants a fair shot at an Artemis-era or NIAC-funded mission needs to demonstrate fidelity at 0.5 to 3 W, not at laboratory-bench wattages.