Semester

Summer

Date of Graduation

2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

MS

College

Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources

Department

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Committee Chair

Hang Woon Lee

Committee Co-Chair

Cagri Kilic

Committee Member

Cagri Kilic

Committee Member

Xi Yu

Committee Member

Piyush Mehta

Abstract

The traffic in cislunar space is expected to increase over the coming years, leading to a higher likelihood of conjunction events among active satellites, orbital debris, and non-cooperative satellites. This increase necessitates enhanced space domain awareness (SDA) capabilities that include state estimation for targets of interest. Both Earth surface-based and space-based observation platforms in geosynchronous orbit or below face challenges such as range, exclusion, and occlusion that hinder observation. Motivated by the need to place space-based observers in the cislunar space regime to overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a cislunar SDA constellation design and analysis framework that integrates state estimation into an optimization problem for determining the placement of observers for optimal state estimation performance on a set of targets. The proposed multi-observer placement optimization problem samples from a range of possible target orbits. Upon convergence, the optimized constellation is validated against a broader set of targets to assess its effectiveness. Two comparative analyses are presented to evaluate the effects of changes in the sensor tasking procedure and sensor fidelity on the optimized constellation, comparing these to a single observer baseline case. A final computational experiment is presented in response to the results found in the first two experiments. The results of the three computational experiments show that the optimized constellations can provide accurate state estimation for various orbit families.

Embargo Reason

Publication Pending

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Available for download on Wednesday, July 23, 2025

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