The Moon’s next space station can hunt for dangerous space junk using its internet antennas as high-powered radar.
Instead of launching multi-million dollar dedicated sensors, this repurposes existing communication hardware on the Lunar Gateway to detect tiny, fast-moving debris. It provides a massive 36-decibel sensing advantage over trying to track those same objects from Earth.
CisLunarSense: Opportunistic ISAC for Debris Detection at the Lunar Gateway
arXiv · 2604.10807
We propose CisLunarSense, an opportunistic integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) framework that exploits the Lunar Gateway's Ka-band relay for monostatic debris detection, addressing the absence of cislunar space situational awareness infrastructure beyond the reach of ground-based radars. Using NASA/ESA-documented system parameters with author-selected sensing settings and a CR3BP-based 9:2 near-rectilinear halo orbit model, we derive the orbit-phase-dependent Cramér--Rao bound under OFDM