Past Event: Oden Institute Seminar

Domain Splitting for Cislunar Uncertainty Propagation

Brandon Jones, Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, UT Austin

Abstract

As humanity races to extend its footprint out to the Moon, the United States must develop and implement new capabilities to maintain awareness of space objects in cislunar space.  In near-Earth space, Earth’s gravity dominates the dynamics, orbits are stable, and trajectory changes require large thrust maneuvers.  That is not the case for the space between the Earth and Moon.  The n-body dynamics can induce a sensitive dependence on initial conditions, i.e., chaos, and even small perturbations yield vastly different trajectories.  This allows satellites to perform efficient trajectory changes and move with more freedom in the region.  This also makes propagated trajectories sensitive to initial uncertainties, poorly characterized perturbations, and unknown maneuvers.  Accurate prediction of a satellite’s translation state and associated uncertainty is essential to tracking space objects.  The goal of this work is to develop methods of physics-informed domain splitting for trajectories in cislunar space consistent with the problem of uncertainty propagation.  This presentation summarizes work performed as part of a Moncrief Grand Challenge Faculty Award to perform domain splitting for both polynomial chaos expansions and Gaussian mixture models for improved space object data association.

Biography

Dr. Brandon A. Jones is an Associate Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin.  Dr. Jones graduated from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2006 with a M.S., where he also completed his Ph.D. in 2010 as a NASA Graduate Student Research Program (GSRP) fellow.  His research program focuses on methods of uncertainty quantification, Bayesian estimation, multi-target filtering, information/data fusion, and satellite navigation.  The research and software tools developed in Dr. Jones’s projects are used as part of the intra-formation conjunction assessment system for NASA’s Magnetospheric Multi-Scale (MMS) mission and deployed in operations for information-theoretic sensor tasking for space situational awareness.  Dr. Jones directs the Texas Spacecraft Laboratory and serves at the Principal Investigator on the SCOPE-1 CubeSat mission to demonstrate the use of terrain-relative navigation on a small satellite platform.