François Thevenot, Safran Data Systems; Baptiste Guillot, Safran Data Systems; Sebastien Herbiniere, Safran Data Systems
Keywords: Cislunar SSA, Orbit Determination, Passive RF
Abstract:
Cislunar activities are rapidly increasing because of multi-national interest to explore the lunar surface and beyond. Indeed, 2024 opened with the launch of Peregrine mission and SLIM’s lunar landing in January, followed by Intuitive Machine’s Nova-C lunar landing in February, the Chang’e 6 lunar landing in May with several missions still to come (Trailbrazer, VIPER, Blue Ghost, PRIME-1, …). As the frequency of cislunar missions increase the capability to accurately track them will be essential to safe and sustainable space operations. As space situational awareness continues to evolve and extends beyond Earth’s orbit, passive RF technology is well suited to support this endeavor.
Passive RF technology offers many advantages:
– persistent tracking through weather and daylight exclusion times with a high revisit rate
– tracking of multiple frequency bands (S, X, C, Ku, Ka); enhancing its robustness
– technology is less prone to produce measurement’s cross tags due to the signal footprint used to perform the measurements
– cross-correlation results in the production of two observables (TDOA and FDOA), each measurement giving access to different orbital parameters observability, increasing efficiency of the orbit determination process.
In this paper, we assess the global performance of Passive RF tracking for cislunar cases. We want to focus on the impact of the use of long baseline configuration on the orbit determination performance. To do so, we will analyze the cislunar orbit determination performance on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission in two configurations: short baseline only and combination of short and long baseline. We will also present results obtained using real data from the Orion Artemis I mission.
Date of Conference: September 17-20, 2024
Track: Cislunar SDA