Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System (CAPS)

Future missions operated by NASA, commercial entities, and international agencies will face increasing congestion due to limited communication and navigation infrastructure. To address this potential bottleneck, Advanced Space proposes to continue developing a high-impact navigation technology that will enable future missions. Specifically, the proposed effort will further develop capabilities to enable autonomous onboard flight navigation that incorporates spaceborne and ground-based measurements. The Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System (CAPS) will use the existing flight radio, antenna, attitude determination and control, and other subsystems of the spacecraft to provide the host spacecraft with an autonomously generated absolute position estimate. CAPS is a peer-to-peer navigation solution that is a self-sustaining, scalable, and evolvable innovation that operationalizes and leverages investments made in algorithms, flight computers, and radios over the past decade. CAPS can be thought of as a subsystem of a host spacecraft that can process inter-spacecraft range and range-rate measurements between multiple spacecraft in cislunar space to determine absolute position estimates for all participating spacecraft. The focus of the proposed effort is to design and develop key software components that will prepare CAPS for flight demonstrations and ultimately broad adoption by future missions to the lunar vicinity.