High performance lunar constellation for navigation services to Moon orbiting users

Abstract

In order to assist the ever growing number of missions planned to visit the Moon, an international effort is being made to design and commission a communication and navigation lunar constellation of satellites. To this purpose, the goal of this study is to provide first a strategy to help the design of a small-sized lunar constellation, entailing different objectives and users to assist. Then, various optimised constellations are tested including the orbital users’ filtering architectures, extracting insights on the state estimation achievable and its capability to support critical GNC tasks.Given the early stage design phase in which this study is carried out, the constellation design does not entail strong and clearly defined requirements yet. For such reason, a multi-objective optimisation (MOO) has been employed, which proved to be extremely beneficial, ensuring a correct amount of versatility to provide a large set of Pareto-optimal solutions. Different objectives associated to both various services and users have been put in place, exploring a search space based on classical Keplerian elements of the constellation servicers.To compare the resulting constellations and validate correctly the performance from a navigation perspective the users navigation scheme has been considered to be based on a GNSS/INS tightly coupled formulation. The GNSS receiver measurements are fused with accelerometer outputs through a navigation filter, providing thus a strategy where the absence of GNSS observables is partially covered by an inertial propagation of the on-board state. Attention is here focused on polar orbiters operational in Low Lunar Orbit (LLO) environment and the obtained results showed navigation capabilities good enough to enable correct execution of missions in the low lunar orbital region.