Orbit Determination of Cislunar Spacecraft Using Inter-Satellite Link Measurements with an Earth-Orbiting Satellite Constellation

With the increasing number of lunar missions, utilizing satellites in special orbits in the cislunar space as relay satellites to provide communication relay and navigation services for spacecraft near the Moon has become a hot topic. DRO (Distant Retrograde Orbit) and NRHO (Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit) are widely used in lunar and deep space exploration missions, offering unique orbital advantages. With the development of a global constellation of LEO satellites, this paper utilizes intersatellite link measurements between LEO satellites and cislunar probes to determine orbital parameters. Under the adopted measurement-noise-only assumptions, Ka-band inter-satellite ranging yielded 3D position errors of 32.074 m for the DRO spacecraft and 20.665 m for the NRHO spacecraft. When laser ISL measurement accuracy reaches 10 times that of Ka-band measurements, simulations show positional accuracies of 2.206 m for NRHO satellite and 3.207 m for DRO satellite, respectively, representing an improvement of approximately 90%. The feasibility of orbit determination for cislunar spacecrafts based on intersatellite link measurements between LEO satellite constellation and cislunar spacecrafts has been verified through simulations. In the future, LEO satellite constellations could play a greater role in cislunar space exploration and even deep space exploration.