Accurate lunar surface PNT based on LCNS orbiter sources and onboard sensor fusion

The Moon exploration has gathered a great interest in the last years and several important initiatives have been launched thanks to international cooperation and to the increasing contribution of private services providers. The ambitious programs foresee robotic exploitation of in-situ resources and establishment of human outposts on the Moon’s surface. To fulfil these challenging objectives, reliable and efficient navigation and communication capabilities are required, and space agencies are encouraging the development of a centralized services infrastructure [1, 2]. In this context, the Lunar Communication and Navigation Service (LCNS) is expected to support next generation lunar missions devoted to high-fidelity mapping, characterization of the environment (dust and radiation), in situ-resource utilization (ISRU) and search for water in permanently shadowed craters [4]. Therefore, our study focuses on a realistic mission scenario, set in the Schrödinger Crater in the Moon’s south polar region, that includes a surface user, i.e., a rover, and a preliminary LCNS configuration. The work aims at investigating the attainable localization performances for the rover by using onboard sensors and the dedicated LCNS in a multi modal sensor fusion approach. This solution is an alternative to vision-based localization techniques, which are not effective in case of lack of features or in permanently shadowed regions. The results show that our method brings a significant improvement in terms of accuracies of the reconstructed rover traverse with respect to dead reckoning.