Ray Tracing Techniques for the Characterization of Lunar Communication Architectures

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of the computational techniques used to characterize the viability of different lunar architectures and their ability to provide communication services to the Lunar surface. This analysis was done with ray-tracing techniques that allow for computations on Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) clusters for a high level of parallelism and severe reduction in computation time. The ray-tracing computations were done with the GPU platform Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) provided by NVIDIA, which utilizes General-Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU). This new method offers the advantage of being able to characterize a significantly larger portion of the Lunar surface due to its computational efficiency and providing a more accurate representation of communication limits instead of the typical and often inaccurate elevation angle mask. The Lunar surface can now be characterized by contact time, outage time, and distance metrics. With these metrics, different proposed Lunar architectures can be evaluated. This reduction in computation time leads to more accurate results and allows these results to be obtained in a time frame that allows for the complete characterization of the trade space. It is then shown that the architecture that provides the highest overall performance will be the dual twelve-hour pathfinder configuration. In addition, this computation method can recreate network parameter figures generated by previous methods but with an increased level of accuracy.