CAPSTONE: A Summary of Flight Operations to Date in the Cislunar Environment
Presented at the 36th Annual Small Satellite Conference 2022
Advanced Space: Tom Gardner, Brad Cheetham, Jeff Parker, Alec Forsman, Ethan Kayser, Michael Thompson, Conner Ott, Lauren DeMoudt, Matt Bolliger, Arlen Kam
Terran Orbital: Keith Thompson, Tristan Latchu, Rebecca Rogers
Stellar Exploration: Brennan Bryant, Tomas Svitek
ABSTRACT
The cislunar environment is about to get much busier and with this increase in traffic comes an increase in the demand for limited resources such as Earth based tracking of and communications with assets operating in and around the Moon. With the number of NASA, commercial, and international missions to the Moon growing rapidly, the need to make these future endeavors as efficient as possible is a challenge that is being solved now. Advanced Space is aiming to mitigate these resource limitations by enabling spacecraft in the cislunar environment to navigate autonomously and reduce the need for oversubscribed ground assets for navigation and maneuver planning. (more…)
35th Annual SmallSat Conference (Virtual) – 2021
Advanced Space: Thomas Gardner, Brad Cheetham, Alec Forsman, Cameron Meek, Ethan Kayser, Jeff Parker, Michael Thompson
Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems: Tristan Latchu, Rebecca Rogers
Stellar Exploration: Brennan Bryant, Tomas Svitek
ABSTRACT
The cislunar environment is about to get much busier and with this increase in traffic comes an increase in the demand for limited resources such as Earth based tracking of and communications with assets operating in and around the Moon. With the number of NASA, commercial, and international missions to the Moon growing rapidly in the next few years, the need to make these future endeavors as efficient as possible is a challenge that is being solved now. Advanced Space is aiming to mitigate these resource limitations by enabling the numerous spacecraft in the cislunar environment to navigate autonomously and reduce the need for oversubscribed ground assets for navigation and maneuver planning. Scheduled to launch on a Rocket Lab Electron in October 2021, the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) mission will leverage a 12U CubeSat to demonstrate both the core software for the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System (CAPS) as well as a validation of the mission design and operations of the Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO) that NASA has baselined for the Artemis Lunar Gateway architecture. Currently being developed in a Phase III of NASA’s SBIR program, our CAPS software will allow missions to manage themselves and enable more critical communications to be prioritized between Earth and future cislunar missions without putting these missions at increased risk. (more…)