Lunar navigation systems are needed for future Moon missions to enable rover navigation, mining, construction, human exploration, and autonomous operations. Lunar construction requires centimeter-scale position accuracy not typically found in previous lunar navigation solutions. The need for high accuracy and affordable cost provides competing demands for solution developers. Orbit determination of satellites and resident space objects often involves observations from a benchmarked surface position to establish an orbiting body’s ephemeris. In our concept, we reverse this process to determine surface location from range and range-rate measurements of an orbiting body with a known ephemeris. In 2020, we developed a point design to study the feasibility of the approach. Here we show that we can close the link for the point design. By allocating the system complexity between the lunar surface and orbit segments we can achieve an affordable and capable lunar navigation solution.


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    Title :

    Reverse-Ephemeris Lunar Navigation for NASA and Commercial Exploration


    Contributors:

    Conference:

    19th Biennial International Conference on Engineering, Science, Construction, and Operations in Challenging Environments ; 2024 ; Miami, Florida


    Published in:

    Publication date :

    2024-10-10




    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English



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