Cislunar Satellite Constellation Design Via Integer Linear Programming

Abstract

Cislunar space domain awareness is of increasing interest to the international community as Earth-Moon traffic is projected to increase, which raises the problem of placing space-based sensors optimally in a constellation to satisfy the space domain awareness demand in cislunar space. This demand profile can vary over space and time, making the design optimization problem challenging. This paper tackles the problem of satellite constellation design for spatio-temporally varying coverage demand by leveraging an integer linear programming formulation. The developed optimization formulation assumes the circular restricted 3-body dynamics and attempts to minimize the number of satellites required for the requested demand profile.