CRATER NAVIGATION AND TIMING FOR AUTONOMOUS LUNAR ORBITAL OPERATIONS IN SMALL SATELLITES

Efforts at NASA and in the commercial space sector seek to extend space operations into cislunar space, lunar orbit, and down to the Moon’s surface. Mission concepts require the extension of infrastructure and support services into these new regimes to enable comparable autonomous and safe operations seen in the near-Earth environment. This paper presents research to develop a Crater Navigation and Timing (CNT) technology capable of running in a 3U CubeSat that is consistent with the operating conditions of the lunar environment. The CNT approach requires three algorithms running on-board the spacecraft: detection of craters in an optical image, identification of those surface features, and fusion of these observations with a predicted trajectory to produce a position, navigation, and timing (PNT) solution. This paper will demonstrate the fusion of these algorithms andshow the PNT performance of the software under small satellite flight-like constraints.