Rapid Discovery of Cislunar Objects (Rapid DisCO)

The goal of this project is to improve current state-of-the-art detection and tracking capabilities to address space situational awareness (SSA) in the cislunar domain, which has been identified as a key objective in the National Cislunar Science & Technology Strategy released by the White House in 2022. Cislunar SSA remains challenging for several reasons, including (1) reduced target signal due to long range, (2) increased optical background noise due to proximity to the Moon, (3) high orbit uncertainty due to three-body dynamics. To address the challenges in the search and discovery of faint objects over a large search volume, we have developed a novel dynamic-programming track-before-detect method that can generate detections of extremely faint objects with limited a priori knowledge with significant improvement in runtime. The method, referred to as the Fast X-ray Transform (FaXT), has been successfully demonstrated on a large-scale asteroid search, providing detections of objects 10x fainter than previously possible. In this effort, we aim to adapt the FaXT methodology to search for faint objects in cislunar space and demonstrate this new capability using the satellite CAPSTONE, a CubeSat currently in lunar orbit, as a test detection target. The impact of this work covers a wide range of applications pertaining to the detection and tracking of space objects under challenging observation conditions, such as in the case of small highly maneuverable space objects, closely spaced objects, and distant space objects such as those in cislunar space.