SBIR/STTR Award attributes
Currently, lunar spacecraft operate in a sensor shadow. The lack of in-place navigational infrastructure means that cislunar orbital assets and mission landers must carry on-board all of the required hardware for vision-based navigation. Spacecraft carry hazard detection sensors, ranging and velocimetry sensors, and compute elements to obtain Position, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) data. This approach is demanding of computational processing and spacecraft power resources. Most onboard navigation systems are point-designed to only support the short-term service demand and will be essentially dead assets once the orbiter is on station or the lander is on the surface. Providing no more utility to the current mission or future missions, these systems have become a mass penalty and a burden of resource allocation that could have otherwise been used for increased payload capacity or expanded spacecraft performance. An opportunity exists to develop a shared cislunar navigation infrastructure by consolidating PNT solutions into a distributed positional awareness array. As the cislunar domain becomes an increasingly competitive environment among US entities, commercial actors, and other spacefaring nations, the demand for precision location tracking will grow. Operators will seek reduced landing ellipses to improve proximity to resource-rich territories, areas of scientific interest, or other strategically important locations. Prepositioned infrastructure acts as a security net to future US-led missions to the Moon by providing redundancy or enhancement to navigational functions. This infrastructure could also support Space Domain Awareness (SDA) by tracking the orbital or surface position of lunar assets and objects. With the proper cislunar navigation infrastructure, spacecraft could be designed for optimization with the potential to save $10M or more per mission in direct subsystem costs, maximize payload delivery yields, and extend overall mission durations. In Phase II, Masten will develop a PNT ground beacon network and perform a demonstration flight of the SkyMage BRN network using Masten's Xodiac rocket powered lander. Four SkyMage PNT beacons will be placed around the test area to create a ground network. The Xodiac vehicle will fly a predefined trajectory and use a receiver to collect position and velocity estimates provided by the ground beacons. After the flight, Masten will use Xodiac's native navigation solution as truth data to compare against the SkyMage PNT data as a post-flight assessment of the utility of the prototype SkyMage BRN solution. This demonstration flight will validate the SkyMage beacons in a terrestrial system and provide a stepping stone to a future closed-loop flight, in which the SkyMage navigation solution would be integrated into Xodiac's navigation algorithm and provide a path towards a future Lunar demonstration.
