Autonomous Optical Navigation for LUMIO Mission

The Lunar Meteoroid Impact Observer (LUMIO) is a 12U CubeSat in a halo orbit at Earth–Moon L2to observe, quantify, and characterize the meteoroid impacts on the lunar farside by detecting their flashes with the LUMIO-Cam. The Moon full disk images obtained by the LUMIO-Cam are also used for navigation purposes. The LUMIO position is obtained by linking the Moon full disk size in an image with the real one, provided that the Moon ephemeris and the CubeSat attitude are known. The LUMIO autonomous navigation performances are tested by generating and processing synthetic Moon images. An extended Kalman filter is implemented to increase the state estimation accuracy. Preliminary results show position errors of less than 10 km, which is a safe threshold.