Surabhi Bhadauria, Purdue University; Arly Black, Purdue University; Carolin Frueh, Purdue University
Keywords: cislunar surveillance, key regions, optmization
Abstract:
Cislunar space is becoming a target for many missions now and in the near future, accelerating the need for comprehensive space domain awareness in that region. Right now, surveillance capabilities are severely lacking, revealing large regions of blindness to any activity and other regions where surveillance can only be established under when the best possible conditions are met. Space-based optical sensors can remedy the situation. However, previous studies have shown that the parameter space for the placement of a given number of sensors is tremendous and ad hoc solutions — while intuitive — might not provide the most cost and performance efficient satellite network locations or will miss out on key locations. The challenge is that even for detected and known objects small maneuvers and departures from those orbits can give access to entirely different regions of space, given the chaotic nature of the system.
As a solution, in this paper, we are combining two elements to show solutions to optimized and efficient sensor distribution for space domain surveillance and tracking in the cislunar regime for maximum information gain. First, dynamical deviation flow is used in order to identify key surveillance regions. This is done leveraging the dynamical structures in the circular restricted three body problem to find the departure tubes, including their bifurcations from any location of a given trajectory for a given delta v.
Previous research has investigated planar trajectories and found through homeomorphic mapping that all trajectories traveling through equilibrium zones must flow through invariant manifolds in space in the phase space even when it is not the case in configuration space. In this work we expand the concept to three-dimensional trajectories. Using these flow parameters allows to identify volumetric regions in cislunar space for which surveillance is most crucial. Flow in the phase space through those region mean that they have a higher information content regarding the prediction of single objects and object populations regarding their future positions and may even be able to be used to judge mission intent in the near term time frame. Furthermore, observations in those regions are necessary in order to limit the state space for observation correlation of unknown targets in the orbit estimation problem. Translating to the state space identifies high priority target regions for surveillance.
In a second step, the optimization process for a fused ground-based and space-based sensor network is shown, in the trade-space of sensor characteristic. A focus of this paper are electro-optical sensors because of their low power constraints, ease of deployment, and overall cost.
In both parts, the dynamical flow and the optimization process in a hybrid of the circular restricted three body problem and the bicircular restricted four-body problem is used, which allows a parameterization of the problem and a global optimization in terms of flow and visibility constraints.
Date of Conference: September 17-20, 2024
Track: Cislunar SDA