A Comparative Analysis of Lunar PNT+C Concepts

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A_Comparative_Analysis_of_Lunar_PNT_C_Concepts.pdf (3.15 MB)
Author(s)
Gabhart, Austin
Drosendahl, Madilyn
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Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering
The Daniel Guggenheim School of Aeronautics was established in 1931, with a name change in 1962 to the School of Aerospace Engineering
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https://hdl.handle.net/1853/76720
Abstract
With the expected increase in cislunar operations, there are many proposed architectures to provide these missions with Positioning, Navigation, Timing, and Communication (PNT+C) support. While most of the architectures are frequently similar in concept, there is significant variation in how they are evaluated. This paper provides an overview of system architecture alternatives presented in literature to develop requirements for an evaluation environment. To provide insight into the relative performance between architectures, an evaluation environment is described in detail to establish the basis for comparison. The evaluation environment includes orbit determination and time synchronization modeling, an implementation of more accurate dilution of precision metrics, and orbit maintenance maneuver modeling and optimization. The configurations for comparison are selected from literature. It is found that constellations made of highly stable elliptical orbits still require significant ΔV to maintain their orbits. It is also found that increasing the variety of orbits and number of satellites significantly improves the performance of the lunar PNT architecture.
Sponsor
Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI)
Date
2025-01
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Text
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Post-print
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