Semester

Summer

Date of Graduation

2026

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 Member

Andrew Rhodes

Committee Member

Piyush Mehta

Committee Member

Zeyu Liu

Abstract

As interest in cislunar space grows, so does the need for space domain awareness (SDA) capabilities to safely support missions. To enhance cislunar SDA capabilities, the use of space-based observers has been proposed. Prior research has explored optimizing observer placement but has not considered scheduling limitations. I propose a mixed-integer linear programming formulation that concurrently optimizes the placement and scheduling of space-based observers for cislunar SDA. This work considers three aspects of observer scheduling: sensor tasking, communication, and charging. A scenario-based approach is utilized that generalizes observer placement for unknown targets while applying scheduling constraints to each scenario. However, this problem quickly becomes difficult for commercial solvers to handle, even for moderately sized instances. To overcome this, a column generation approach is employed to introduce well-performing schedules into the problem for each orbital slot. A comparative analysis is performed across multiple instances to evaluate the performance of column generation against that of a commercial solver. A case study is then conducted in which the performance of the observers' placement from the concurrent formulation is tested against a validation target set and compared with the performance of two baselines in which placement and scheduling are performed sequentially.

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