Artemis’s Compass: Navigation Architecture and Challenges in Support of Initial Lunar Missions

Through the Artemis missions, NASA is supporting a broad set of capabilities to enable a robust sustainable human lunar exploration economy. To meet the mission objectives, jumps in performances are needed across multiple technical disciplines to enable areas such as precision landing, heavy lift, large cargo lunar landing, complex remote infrastructure deployment and operation, and small-scale nuclear power in space to name a few. While several of the fundamental technologies needed have been tested and demonstrated in either technology or science missions of opportunity, the Artemis campaign will bring together multiple elements into a complex multi-partner dance where all pieces must work well together to complete the mission.

This paper will focus on the navigation challenges and architecture across each phase of a representative Artemis Mission . A summary of the key goals of each mission is given in Figure 1. A detailed description of Artemis V will serve as an example mission to capture the complexities and challenges being faced across a multi-vehicle constellation involving landers, crew vehicle, space stations, surface exploration elements, and in-situ infrastructure. Earlier missions, III and IV, present a subset of the phases identified, though the same challenges remain . This paper will provide an overview of each phase of the mission that provide the integrated capability to move humans and cargo from Earth to the lunar surface and back again. These includes Earth ascent, transfer to and docking in lunar orbit, descent to, operation on, and ascent from the lunar surface, as well as safe return to the Earth.

This paper will focus on the navigation challenges, explicitly, across each phase, and provide an overview of the expected approaches. This will reference government insight and other studies that have been conducted to address similar missions. In addition to the detailed description of each flight phase that has a strong reliance on positioning capability, this paper will also provide a discussion of other high level architectural capabilities and design standards. These include the usage of common coordinate systems, certified flight data, as well as broader use case, such as traffic management and collision avoidance. By providing a summary of the design approaches and challenges across the Artemis enterprise, this paper intends to provide readers with insight to the operational architecture and help to identify and support key areas of continued research and development.