Lunar Communications CubeSat Constellation Design

As NASA strides towards exploring life on Mars in the coming future, a lunar space station is considered to be a baseline for the mighty goal. The moon will be a “basecamp” for astronauts to train in a daunting space environment and also for proving technologies for Mars. The lunar south pole will serve as the staging point for robotic and crewed exploration and is of great interest to the scientific community.

All of these goals will be assisted by a space station orbiting the moon called the Lunar Gateway. Its intended purpose is to serve as a solar-powered communication hub, science laboratory, short-term habitation module, and holding area for rovers and other robots for moon missions. The DUST team sought this as an opportunity to develop a novel CubeSat constellation architecture to further assist Lunar Gateway in communicating with the ground crew on the lunar surface.

Hereby is a conceptual design of a CubeSat constellation which employs the powerful capability of a mesh-networking system for helping astronauts relay information to/from the Lunar Gateway and amongst themselves in an efficient manner.

For further information about this project, a detailed report can be found here.