On-Orbit Assembly and Manufacturing of Large Structures to Enable Space Situational Awareness

Recent decades have seen increased interest in the Moon and cislunar operations. To ensure safety of flight and peace of operations in the cislunar domain, space traffic management is required, which, in turn, necessitates a dedicated space situational awareness (SSA) system. However, SSA in the cislunar domain is notoriously difficult to achieve due to the inherently large volume and the chaotic nature of orbits in the regime. These characteristics produce challenges in establishing persistent monitoring and limit predictive capabilities. To address these challenges, we detail a trade space for constructing an effective SSA architecture in the cislunar space domain through a tiered radio frequency (RF)/optical sensing architecture. Our results show that a paradigm shift in space operations that achieves on-orbit manufacturing of large precise structures from in-situ resources enables timely and persistent cislunar SSA. Such a paradigm shift removes the launch constraints imposed on sensors, allowing for the deployment of sensors that are 5-10x the size of structures currently available. We show how large, precise optical and RF apertures improve SSA architecture performance in the cislunar domain through improved signal-to-noise ratios, resolutions, and detection ranges.