REACHABILITY-BASED APPROACH FOR SEARCH AND DETECTION OF MANEUVERING CISLUNAR OBJECTS

With recent and planned missions to cislunar space, there exists a developing need for expanding space domain awareness to include cislunar space. Detection, tracking, and maneuver reconstruction in Earth orbits is already a difficult task and is exponentially more difficult in the cislunar domain given the shear volume and the chaotic nature of the three-body problem. Additionally, many of these methods assume that measurements of the target spacecraft are readily available. The focus of this work is to examine the utility of the recently developed reachability set search (RSS) algorithm in regaining custody of a cislunar target lost due to an unknown, bounded maneuver. The objective of in this work is to numerically define a Taylor series approximation to the reachability set of a cislunar spacecraft given a priori knowledge on only the maximum ∆v and a window for the time-of-maneuver, optimally search the reachability set, and perform state estimate and maneuver reconstruction following detection of the target. This algorithm is tested two scenarios: a L₁ halo orbit and a L₂ Lyapunov to L₁ Lyapunov transfer with 10.25 m/s and 100 m/s maneuver capabilities, respectively. The RSS algorithm proves effective assuming accurate reachability set approximations, which is a function of the order of the polynomial approximation, volume of the true reachable space, and proximity to the lunar singularity.