Cislunar Space Situational Awareness from the Moon with Small Optical Systems

Renewed activities in lunar exploration by the U.S., our allies, and our adversaries are transforming the cislunar orbital regime into a new strategic operations domain – no longer uncontested. Surveillance of this domain is challenging; the radars and global telescope networks that maintain our current space situational awareness (SSA) are not designed to cover this enlarged volume of space, and at present, self-reported telemetry is the primary source. This is problematic even from friendly assets, let alone from adversaries. Large, ground-based instruments can cover much of the cislunar volume, which extends from geostationary orbit to beyond the Earth-Moon L2 Lagrange point, 12 times farther away. Systems like this are multi-million-dollar facilities, subject to all the issues faced by ground-based telescopes including nighttime operations, geographic coverage, weather, and especially scattered moonlight. Sky brightness near the Moon makes detecting faint objects close to the Moon exceedingly difficult. From the lunar surface, this region is much easier to surveil. The challenge instead is deploying and operating a telescope there. Fortunately, the new activity in cislunar space also offers new opportunities. NASA’s Commercial Lander Payload Service (CLPS) program is developing standardized platforms for instruments on the lunar surface, paralleling the cubesat revolution currently transforming near-Earth space. This means specialized billion-dollar, decade-spanning missions are no longer required -- small, standardized landers will enable routine access to the lunar surface.   The CLPS program presents a tremendous opportunity for deploying small, wide-field optical telescopes on the lunar surface. The first of these will have to be based on optics, detectors and processing systems that already have a heritage in space. There are a large number of optical systems already in space, but only a few of those point out into space, and most of them would not be a good match for the cislunar SSA mission. The right combination of these components could be deployed rapidly and inexpensively on early CLPS missions – so far, the selected instruments only look down at the lunar surface. A small optical telescope, appropriately optimized, could demonstrate the immense value of cislunar SSA from the surface, while at the same time contribute to scientific missions. J. T. McGraw and Associates, LLC (JTMA) proposes to use our extensive expertise in optical design, detector operation, image processing, and the lunar environment to create the most capable cislunar SSA system possible for both initial CLPS landers and for larger, subsequent landers. Ultimately, one or a few telescopes – whether on the ground, in Earth or lunar orbit, or on the lunar surface – will be insufficient to cover this entire subtle and complex orbital environment. Multiple small telescopes on the Moon would provide unique and essential capability.