LONEStar: The Lunar Flashlight Optical Navigation Experiment
Michael Krause Ava Thrasher Priyal Soni Liam Smego Reuben Isaac Jennifer Nolan Micah Pledger E. Glenn Lightsey W. Jud Ready John Christian
This paper documents the results from the highly successful Lunar flashlight
Optical Navigation Experiment with a Star tracker (LONEStar). Launched in
December 2022, Lunar Flashlight (LF) was a NASA-funded technology demonstration
mission. After a propulsion system anomaly prevented capture in lunar orbit, LF
was ejected from the Earth-Moon system and into heliocentric space. NASA
subsequently transferred ownership of LF to Georgia Tech to conduct an unfunded
extended mission to demonstrate further advanced technology objectives,
including LONEStar. From August-December 2023, the LONEStar team performed
on-orbit calibration of the optical instrument and a number of different OPNAV
experiments. This campaign included the processing of nearly 400 images of star
fields, Earth and Moon, and four other planets (Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and
Saturn). LONEStar provided the first on-orbit demonstrations of heliocentric
navigation using only optical observations of planets. Of special note is the
successful in-flight demonstration of (1) instantaneous triangulation with
simultaneous sightings of two planets with the LOST algorithm and (2) dynamic
triangulation with sequential sightings of multiple planets.