Cislunar Satellite Constellation Design Via Integer Linear Programming

Abstract

Cislunar space awareness is of increasing interest to the international community as Earth-Moon traffic is projected to increase. This raises the problem of placing satellites optimally in a constellation to provide satisfactory coverage for said traffic. The Circular Restricted 3 Body Problem (CR3BP) provides promising periodic orbits in the Earth-Moon rotating frame for traffic monitoring. This work converts a spatially and temporally varying traffic coverage requirement into an integer linear programming problem, attempting to minimize the number of satellites required for the requested coverage.Comment: 18 pages, 15 figures, submitted to 2023 AAS Conferenc