Space Situational Awareness in Cislunar Space
Abstract
Cislunar space is an active frontier of space exploration and operation for many of the world s space powers. While the problem of knowing what spacecraft are active in cislunar space has fundamental parallels to SSA activities in Earth orbit, all of the possible orbits, methods of analysis and practical approaches for maintaining cognizance are di↵erent in this regime. Almost all fundamental methods and inherited wisdom for performing these activities for objects in Earth orbit are not applicable to the cislunar environment, providing a rich set of fundamental problems to be understood and solved, as well as many new opportunities to be discovered. Extension of Space Situational Awareness (SSA) to cislunar space requires all aspects of the traditional approaches to SSA to be reformulated and extended to account for the chaotic and non-Keplerian nature of motion in this regime. Our proposed research leverages recent research progress by the Co-PIs in developing fundamental approaches to better describe motion and uncertainty propagation in the cislunar regime. This provides an opportunity to advance our understanding of SSA in the cislunar regime, combining the Co-PIs areas of expertise to explore the fundamental limits of what can be done in this unique dynamical environment. The research continues and expands upon progress by the Co-PIs in previous years of AFOSR support, and will utilize a collaborative approach to realize the next stage of advancement. 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 AandM University the research is led by co-PI Prof. Kyle T. Alfriend and supports two graduate students. 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 FA9550-21-1-0332 with the University of Colorado into the cislunar space realm. The PIs will manage their collaboration in several ways- frequent communications will continue, as they have in previous years, including mutual visits several times a year; student researchers from each institution will interact at virtual and in-person conferences and workshops, enabling techniques and capabilities to be shared within the larger team; the Co-PIs will serve on PhD committees from supported students at each institution, furthering a practice initialized with the previous research grant period. Due to the richer dynamics of cislunar space, new possibilities may be found that can be utilized to extend or identify new capabilities for SSA in this region. To make research progress along such pathways we propose a course of research that explicitly looks at several di↵erent fundamental questions that arise when we consider SSA in the cislunar regime. We break these proposed research problems up as follows. 1.Quasi-Periodic Orbit (QPO) computation and utilization in cislunar space, including the useof QPOs for formation flight 2. Mapping uncertainty into cislunar orbit elements and QPO families to enable long-term propagation accuracy 3.Reachable set computation and the topology of sets in phase space, providing a rigorousapproach to projecting future spacecraft actions 4.Transforming SSA into lunar and cislunar orbit, leveraging approaches developed for SSAinto a new regime
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Feb 06, 2025
- Source ID
- FA95502510016
Entities
People
- Daniel Scheeres
Organizations
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- Regents of the University of Colorado
- United States Air Force