Space Domain Awareness in Cislunar Space
Abstract
The expansion of Space Domain Awareness (SDA) to cislunar space requires all aspects of the traditional approaches to Space Situational Awareness (SSA) and SDA problems to be reformulated and extended to account for the chaotic and non-Keplerian nature of motion in this regime. Many of the techniques and approaches developed for Earth orbiters are not applicable to the cislunar regime. Understanding and addressing these issues will motivate research into fundamental questions of celestial mechanics and astrodynamics. We propose to conduct fundamental research into how the dynamics in cislunar space will impact traditional approaches to SDA, and how they will open up new opportunities that leverage the much more dynamic and chaotic characteristics of motion in this regime. Results from this research program can be used to develop pathways towards understanding how SDA can be applied and extended to cislunar space. These studies will also lead to improved tracking strategies to enable the identification of hypothesized physical e.ects, improved modeling techniques to more accurately fit observations, and the development of methods to analytically discern the actions of controlled space objects based on measurable quantities. Research methods used in this study rely on fundamental methods from celestial mechanics, astrodynamics, optimal control and dynamical systems theory. This is a multi-investigator and multi-institution proposal. At the University of Colorado the research is led by co-PI Prof. Daniel J. Scheeres and supports two graduate students. At Texas A and M University the research is led by co-PI Prof. Kyle T. Alfriend and supports a post-doctoral scholar and a graduate student. The research team also has Prof. Marcus Holzinger, at the University of Colorado, as a collaborator to help guide the proposed research with an eye for its future practical implementation. The current research proposal expands research currently being carried out by the same team under AFOSR grant FA9550-18-1-0313 with the University of Colorado into the cislunar space realm. The proposed research is split into four main components- Lunar orbital theory, orbital motion across the cislunar space regime, mapping of uncertainty in unstable and chaotic environments, and the generalization of existing advanced SDA techniques into the cislunar regime. The first component will be focused on developing an analytical theory for orbital motion about the moon, accounting for the extreme perturbations that lunar orbiters must account for. The second component will be focused on characterizing and categorizing motion within and across the cislunar environment, which is a dynamical region that contains chaotic and unstable motions as well as having regions of stability and high predictability. The third component studies the implication of symplectic topology of these systems, when viewed as Hamiltonian dynamical systems, which has strong constraints for how uncertainty distributions can be understood and constrained. The final component will explore how SDA and SSA approaches are transformed when moving from Earth orbiters to Lunar orbiters and the cislunar regime in general. Crucial questions of SDA to be studied in these new regimes include correlation of observations to support initial orbit determination and object classification, uncertainty propagation and constraints accounting for mapping orbits through regions of hyperbolic instability, and analysis and constraints on active satellites including their reachability in chaotic and unstable orbital regimes.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Mar 07, 2023
- Source ID
- FA95502110332
Entities
People
- Daniel Scheeres
Organizations
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- Regents of the University of Colorado
- United States Air Force