A Case Study Analysis for Designing a Lunar Navigation Satellite System with Time Transfer from the Earth GPS

Abstract

Over a half century since the end of the Apollo program, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will return humans to the Moon. In the coming decade, through the Artemis missions, NASA will land the first woman and person of color on the lunar south pole (Smith et al., 2020). Additionally, many space agencies are participating in an international effort to establish a sustainable human presence on the Moon, which serves as a crucial platform to support future deep space exploration (Laurini & Gerstenmaier, 2014). Indeed, we are entering a second space race, with international space agencies planning over forty lunar missions in the next decade and with crucial involvement from commercial space industry companies, including SpaceX and Blue Origin. To support increasing plans for crewed and robotic activities, future lunar missions will require access to reliable and precise position, navigation, and timing (PNT) services everywhere on the Moon.Recently, the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the European Space Agency (ESA) conceptualized global positioning system (GPS)-like satellite constellations around the Moon, named LunaNet (Israel et al., 2020) and Moonlight (Cozzens, 2021),