AEROSPACE ENGINEERING

Abstract

There is a resurgence in missions to the Moon fueled by the Artemis program and NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, with an increasing number of national and international entities eyeing operations beyond the geosynchronous orbit region. To support these missions and to sustain operations far from the Earth, Space Domain Awareness (SDA) in the cislunar domain has gained significant attention, with the overarching goal being the foundational, current, and predictive knowledge of objects operating in cislunar space. This talk will address some of the challenges associated with cislunar SDA, including inconsistent ground support from the Earth, uncertainty in spacecraft state over time, and the characterization of spacecraft dynamics in a highly chaotic and nonlinear environment. Techniques in multi-body dynamics can be leveraged to mitigate these challenges in support of spacecraft trajectory design for cislunar operations.

Speaker

Dr. Maaninee Gupta

Postdoctoral researcher in the PROMETHEUS Lab led by Prof. Kyle DeMars at Texas A&M University. She received her Ph.D. in May 2024 under Prof. Kathleen Howell at Purdue University, where she researched multi-body dynamics and the application of resonant orbits towards cislunar trajectory design. She also received her bachelor's and master's degrees in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering from Purdue in 2018 and 2020, respectively.