Lunar Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT)

Catalog description

We are entering a new era of Moon exploration with 100+ planned missions, including the Artemis mission to send humans to the Moon again after the Apollo era. Reliable lunar positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) is critical for lunar exploration, supporting autonomous rovers, satellites, and long-duration infrastructure. This course introduces the principles and algorithms needed to design and evaluate lunar PNT systems spanning orbit and surface operations. The course begins with motivation and a review of GPS, astrodynamics, and state estimation algorithms. It then covers lunar-specific fundamentals including lunar time systems, reference frames, and orbit determination and time synchronization (ODTS) concepts. ODTS topics include square root filters and the use of GPS sidelobe signals. The course also surveys common lunar orbit regimes and the system-level design of lunar navigation architectures, including signal design and constellation optimization. The final portion of the course focuses on surface navigation, including AI-based vision navigation, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), and path planning. The course concludes with a discussion of emerging research directions. Coursework includes programming assignments, a data analysis lab using real mission data, and a final project.