Space Domain Awareness in the Artemis Era

Since the Apollo era, space has become an increasingly valuable domain for national security due to diplomatic, informational, and economic reasons. The last few years have seen exponential growth in the launch of space objects and there is an increased interest in having a permanent cislunar presence through the Artemis program. The understanding of motion of a spacecraft in multi-body environment is essential to transit between different regions in the cislunar space and to forecast and track objects in the cislunar space. The perturbed two-body restrictive framework has led to extensive modeling, analysis, and analytical solutions to study spacecraft motion in orbits around the Earth. However, beyond GEO (XGEO) the dynamical environment shifts, and the structure of fundamental behaviors can be radically different. The primary challenge that limits the transferability of tools and techniques from the GEO to XGEO region is non-Keplerian dynamics, data sparsity from limited coverage and availability of sensors. The process of orbit determination and forecasting the path for an object based on short time arc observations is not trivial. This talk will introduce novel tools to track spacecraft motion in cislunar space and transfers between different regions in cislunar space. These tools make use of dynamical system theory in combination with advances in optimal control theory to provide a better understanding of transport mechanisms in cislunar space. Local orbit elements will be discussed to characterize the trajectories in the cislunar space.

Dr. Puneet Singla is a Harry and Arlene Schell Professor of the Aerospace engineering at the Pennsylvania State University (PSU). Dr. Singla’s research focus pertains to uncertainty propagation through nonlinear systems, data driven modelling and control of autonomous systems. His research related honours include the IEEE AESS’s Judith A. Resnik Award, NSF CAREER award, the AFOSR Young Investigator award, the University at Buffalo’s “Exceptional Scholar” Young Investigator Award and the Texas A&M University’s Young Aerospace Engineering Distinguished Alumni Award in recognition of his scholarly activities. He is a fellow of American Astronautical Society (AAS) and an associate fellow of American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).