A Parametric Data Handling Evaluation Framework for Autonomous Lunar Networks

Different and exciting exploration opportunities toward the Moon are opening in this decade. In particular, the major space agencies are putting a considerable effort in designing and studying a broad spectrum of missions that will bring back the humans on the Moon. During the evaluation of Lunar mission concepts, having a tool that can quickly assess the best communication and data-handling architecture given a set of satellites and a site of interest is mandatory. In this work, a novel parametric framework is presented and applied to the study of the expected connectivity of Lunar networks. The framework comprises bent-pipe, store-and-forward and store-carry-and-forward networking approaches, covering most common data management options. The methodology is designed to determine the best communication architecture given an arbitrary set of available satellites, ground stations, point of interest, and data volume. The proposed algorithm has been applied in a motivating case study of a networked mission devoted to observing lava tubes sites on the Moon surface. Results validate the approach which can identify the inflection points where different data handling techniques outperform each other.