Ephemeris and Almanac Design for Lunar Navigation Satellites

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel combined ephemeris and almanac message representation for lunar navigation satellites, enhancing accuracy and efficiency for lunar orbit determination within data constraints.

Contribution

It proposes a hybrid Chebyshev-Fourier approach for ephemeris and a compact polynomial-Fourier model for almanac data, optimized for lunar satellite navigation systems.

Findings

Achieves sub-meter position accuracy for 6-hour ephemeris arcs.

Maintains sub-millimeter-per-second velocity accuracy.

Provides reliable satellite visibility predictions within data size limits.

Abstract

This paper presents almanac and ephemeris message representation for lunar navigation satellites supporting the Lunar Augmented Navigation System (LANS). The proposed method combines osculating orbital elements, Chebyshev polynomials, and Fourier series to efficiently represent lunar satellite trajectories subject to complex perturbations from lunar gravity and third-body effects. For the ephemeris, a hybrid Chebyshev--Fourier formulation improves fitting accuracy over long arcs while maintaining message compactness under the data-size constraint of the LunaNet Interoperability Specification. For the almanac, a compact low-order polynomial and Fourier model is introduced to capture mid-term orbital variations over a 15-day fitting arc. The approach is validated for multiple orbit regimes, including 30-hour, 24-hour, and 12-hour elliptical lunar frozen orbits (ELFOs) and a 6-hour polar orbit. Results show that the proposed framework achieves sub-meter position and sub-millimeter-per-second velocity fitting errors within the 900-bit limit for 6-hour ephemeris arcs, and almanac fitting accuracy sufficient for reliable satellite-visibility identification in warm-start operations.