MARS (Mobile Autonomous Robotic Swarms) for Cislunar Space Domain Awareness

We propose MARS (Mobile Autonomous Rover Swarm) for Cislunar Space Domain Awareness from the lunar surface that will provide localized, real-time space domain awareness with wide area coverage for the lunar surface and cislunar orbits while providing the USAF the ability to identify, analyze, and perform other functions. MARS will also provide the capability to act as a ‘ground-station’ to support spacecraft operations in cislunar space providing position, navigation, and timing solutions for cislunar space. MARS has strong support from key stakeholders in the aerospace industry further detailed in the full proposal. The USAF not only protects our skies but utilizes space capabilities to ensure our military always has the high ground. With adversaries, such as China and Russia both announcing projects that are aimed at cislunar space dominance, MARS provides the USAF a key advantage in this ultimate high ground. Traditional lunar rovers, such as VIPER, are costly systems typically ranging from $100 million - $750 million dollars per rover and need up to 60 human operators to function. This severely limits the number of rovers one can operate in a given mission and therefore the scope of a mission. By using more advanced, cost-effective platforms, such as Lunar Outpost’s vetted MAPP (Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform) rover, a distributed network of rovers can be deployed to give real-time, localized, wide area space domain awareness to the user, with one user being able to control many robots. This effort will build upon Lunar Outpost’s non-DoD work with MAPP and ALPS (Autonomous Lunar Prospecting Swarm) to augment and customize the systems as necessary for DoD use.