Search Results (4)

Today, Moon exploration is driven by the desire to expand the human presence beyond Earth and to use its resources. This requires the development of reliable navigation systems that can provide positioning information accurately and continuously on the lunar surface and orbits. Initiatives such as Moonlight (by ESA) and the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System project (by NASA) are underway to address this challenge. The aim is to use ranging signals transmitted by satellites, similar to Earth’s GNSS, for lunar user positioning. This paper proposes a solution that involves local sensors deployed on the Moon surface to enhance the performance of the satellite system. These sensors can serve as differential reference stations, correcting satellite pseudorange measurements obtained by lunar surface receivers. The local sensor can also be used as a pseudolite, transmitting satellite-like signals to improve system availability and accuracy in obstructed areas. Additionally, the local sensor can act as an independent beacon that provides range and angle measurements. Higher navigation performance can be achieved by increasing the complexity of the system, depending on the implemented solution. This paper proposes and shows the concept, the intial design, and a preliminary definition of the protocol for the third solution. The three different solutions are compared in terms of position accuracy by exploiting the Cramér–Rao Lower-Bound formulation and Monte Carlo simulations. Finally, possible implementations for future use on the Moon are discussed. Full article

Previous lunar missions, such as Surveyor, Apollo, and the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE), have played a pivotal role in advancing our understanding of the lunar exosphere’s dynamics and its relationship with solar wind flux. The insights gained from these missions have laid a strong foundation for our current knowledge. However, due to insufficient near-surface observations, the scientific community has faced challenges in interpreting the phenomena of lunar dust lofting and levitation. This paper introduces the concept of signals of opportunity (SoOP), which utilizes radio occultation (RO) to retrieve the near-surface dust density profile on the Moon. Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) radio science beacon (RSB) signals are used to demonstrate this method. By mapping the concentration of lunar near-surface dust using RO, we aim to enhance our understanding of how charged lunar dust interacts with surrounding plasma, thereby contributing to future research in this field and supporting human exploration of the Moon. Additionally, the introduced SoOP will be able to provide observational constraints to physical model development related to lunar surface particle sputtering and the reactions of near-surface dust in the presence of solar wind and electrostatically charged dust grains. Full article

The increasing complexity of lunar exploration missions necessitates stricter navigation requirements, especially when human life is involved. Extensive research is currently being conducted on various positioning systems suitable for the lunar environment. These include both the exploitation of terrestrial GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) signals, and the deployment of a lunar-dedicated satellite system known as the Lunar Communication and Navigation Service (LCNS). In order to meet the demanding navigation requirements, the usage of one or more lunar beacons to enhance Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) performance for different assets is under investigation to complement the LCNS system. This research aims to demonstrate the improvement of PNT accuracy by exploiting Differential LCNS (DLCNS) positioning techniques. To this end, both Single Point Positioning (SPP) and DLCNS techniques along with estimation algorithms such as Weighted Least Squares (WLS) and Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) were developed in a simulated lunar environment to assess their performances. Full article

As a growing number of exploration missions have successfully landed on the Moon in recent decades, ground infrastructures, such as radio beacons, have attracted a great deal of attention in the design of navigation systems. None of the available studies regarding integrating beacon measurements for pinpoint landing have considered uncertain initial beacon locations, which are quite common in practice. In this paper, we propose a radio beacon/inertial measurement unit (IMU)/altimeter localization scheme that is sufficiently robust regarding uncertain initial beacon locations. This scheme was designed based on the sparse extended information filter (SEIF) to locate the lander and update the beacon configuration at the same time. Then, an adaptive iterated sparse extended hybrid filter (AISEHF) was devised by modifying the prediction and update stage of SEIF with a hybrid-form propagation and a damping iteration algorithm, respectively. The simulation results indicated that the proposed method effectively reduced the error in the position estimations caused by uncertain beacon locations and made an effective trade-off between the estimation accuracy and the computational efficiency. Thus, this method is a potential candidate for future lunar exploration activities. Full article