May 16, 2023
Brandon Jones is one of three recipients of the Oden Institute's 2023 W. A. "Tex" Moncrief Grand Challenge Award which is given to researchers that aim to find solutions to society's biggest, most important questions.
Jones will use his award to develop physics-informed methods of splitting the domain of random inputs for propagation of orbit-state uncertainty in cislunar space. As near-rivals race to establish a permanent presence on the Moon, Jones hopes his project will help the United States act quickly to develop and implement new surveillance capabilities for Space Domain Awareness (SDA). Accurate prediction of a satellite’s translation state and associated uncertainty is essential to tracking anthropogenic space objects for SDA. While particle methods will work, their runtime can be expensive and their use in orbit determination and object tracking can be problematic. Instead, this project will consider physics-informed approaches to splitting the input domain, thereby breaking the larger problem into more tractable sub-problems. Jones will carefully determine the appropriate measures of nonlinearity to identify the possibly multiple directions of splitting and how to best divide along each. Existing methods of non-Gaussian uncertainty propagation will then be used with each sub-domain with the intention of producing a tractable approach to uncertainty propagation in cislunar space.
