Cedric Petion, The University of Texas at Austin; Brandon Jones, The University of Texas at Austin
Keywords: admissible regions, cislunar, multi-fidelity, uncertainty propagation, initial orbit determination (IOD), space situational awareness (SSA)
Abstract:
The expansion of mission operations in cislunar space is expected to significantly increase the number of anthropogenic space objects (ASOs), creating a pressing demand for initial orbit determination (IOD) techniques specifically developed for this regime. Cislunar orbit determination is complicated by the region’s vast spatial extent, chaotic dynamical behavior, and the limited availability of observational data. This paper introduces a novel approach for generating optical cislunar admissible regions by leveraging the expected population of ASOs in quasi-periodic orbits. We hypothesize a set of periodic orbit families from the circular restricted three-body problem corresponding to quasi-periodic orbits in the full ephemeris on which an observed space object may reside and identify the range and range-rate pair that best aligns with the given measurement under this hypothesis. For computational efficiency, we use an interpolated approximation of the manifolds associated with these periodic orbit families to solve the inverse problem. A region of uncertainty is then constructed around the resulting solution to account for discrepancies between the approximated manifold and a full-physics model; this region constitutes the admissible region. For forward propagation of this region, we implement an adaptive multi-fidelity framework that dynamically adjusts the perturbations included in the force model to minimize computational cost while maintaining a prescribed level of modeling accuracy. The proposed methods are validated using trajectory data from both historical and planned cislunar missions, demonstrating their relevance and effectiveness for IOD and space situational awareness in the cislunar domain.
Date of Conference: September 16-19, 2025
Track: Cislunar SDA