LAPS: Lunar Autonomous Positioning System

NASA’s return to the Moon will include a host of missions that require accurate surface localization. Tasks such as repeatable precision landing, scientific endeavors on the far side of the Moon, and accurate resource prospecting each require Position, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) capabilities well beyond what current infrastructure provides. Proposed solutions either provide insufficient localization accuracy, require large infrastructure investments or labor-intensive maintenance, or have limited service area. This work proposes a Lunar Autonomous Positioning System (LAPS) that leverages existing missions and introduces select, supplementary PNT assets to provide autonomous, mission-centric PNT services. This unique architecture is enabled by coordination, synchronization, and error correction algorithms that combine available PNT assets to create PNT information sufficient for the end-user’s needs. The proposal concerns the construction of an ad-hoc network of orbital and ground resources that provides Position, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) services for lunar surface operations. While functionally similar to the Global Positioning System (GPS) for Earth, this system will instead build an automated PNT framework using a combination of participating planned lunar missions, supplementary PNT satellites, surface beacons, and advanced autonomy algorithms. The goal is to provide coverage and accuracy sufficient to meet the requirements of identified lunar surface missions while circumventing large infrastructure investments and manual calibration required as would be required for a GPS-like solution. State-of-the-art designs for orbital-based lunar positioning technology primarily utilize weak signal GPS or High Earth Orbit (HEO) GPS. Simulation of these techniques has shown positioning errors of 100 m (1-3ힼ), which will not meet many mission localization requirements without additional user INS augmentation. Ground-based positioning options, for example star trackers and high accuracy maps or a surface beacon network, rely on dedicated infrastructure and provide limited coverage. Hardware-centric solutions for timekeeping in space that utilize high accuracy clocks are also under current investigation, but again require dedicated solutions relying on immature technology. This effort instead offers a PNT design that could be used anywhere on the lunar surface and is facilitated by existing, accessible hardware technology. Also unlike the current proposal, Earth’s GPS infrastructure makes little use of automated PNT algorithms. Automated techniques for other multi-unit systems however, such as robot swarms or mobile sensor networks, have received more attention. Localization algorithms often rely on a Distributed, Extended Kalman Filter (DEKF) to coordinate all available sensor measurements across the group. Various Kalman filter-based algorithms have also been developed for synchronization of local clocks to a reference clock, with high accuracy/highefficiency implementations that exploit doppler shift.

Current designs for orbital-based lunar positioning technology primarily utilize weak signal GPS which frequently do not meet mission localization needs. Ground-based options rely on dedicated infrastructure and provide limited coverage. Further, Earth’s GPS relies on labor-intensive and infrastructure-heavy correction procedures. The proposed effort instead offers a PNT design that could be used anywhere on the lunar surface, utilizes accessible hardware technology, and reduces labor with automation.

This is a mature technology (TRL 7+) — the realistic path in is usually NASA's Technology Transfer Program: licensing an existing NASA patent, or a Space Act Agreement to use NASA facilities/expertise directly. NASA also runs a startup licensing program with no upfront fee for companies formed to commercialize a specific NASA technology.

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