The growing amount of space hardware in the region between Earth and the moon, known as cislunar space, is a cause for concern among experts. They warn that even one fragmentation event can have catastrophic consequences for future lunar exploration, emphasizing the need for effective debris characterization tools.
Purdue University researchers Arly Black and Carolin Frueh highlight the lack of space domain awareness, especially as cislunar activity intensifies. Unlike Earth's atmosphere, which naturally cleans up orbital debris, fragments circling the moon remain trapped in its gravity. The team's research, published in Advances in Space Research, identifies several critical issues.
With multinational lunar and cislunar exploration already underway, there's a need for more knowledge and modeling of spacecraft breakups in the cislunar environment. This includes understanding the behavior of missions like China's lunar orbiters and rovers, Israel's Beresheet lunar lander, India's Chandrayaan-3, NASA's CAPSTONE, and the Artemis endeavor, which includes the Gateway outpost in NRHO.
Black and Frueh emphasize the need for comprehensive predictions of breakup behavior, considering factors like spacecraft motion, solar radiation pressure, and gravitational influences. They also point out that the complex dynamics of the Earth-moon system make it challenging to model debris scenarios.
Black highlights the growing cislunar population and the importance of taking a proactive approach to debris analysis before a catastrophic fragmentation event occurs. Frueh underscores the potential for debris to impact the moon, Earth, and satellites. The researchers emphasize that fragmentations in the cislunar region are not a matter of "if," but "when."
They cite the example of "Snoopy," a discarded lunar module from the Apollo 10 mission, which was ejected into an orbit around the sun and later identified as an Earth-crossing object. Frueh emphasizes the importance of space situational awareness to push back the time for such events.