Cislunar Explorers

Cislunar Explorers was a flight experiment project within the Space Systems Design Studio. It was a 12U CubeSat (cube satellite) demonstrating the viability of water electrolysis propulsion and optical navigation technologies in a GTO to Escape Earth’s Sphere of Influence (SOI) orbit. We are a research team at Cornell University comprising undergraduate and graduate students.

The primary technology demonstration was water electrolysis propulsion. This mission aimed to pave the way for future missions to demonstrate In Situ Resource Utilization of water. Spacecraft travel is limited by the type of fuel used and the amount of fuel consumption throughout the duration of a mission. Water is abundant in our solar system. Refueling spacecraft with onboard water will enable more delta-v intensive missions.                                

The CisLunar Explorers team had successfully demonstrated water electrolysis propulsion in a laboratory setting (February 2021). Water stored in a propulsion tank was electrolyzed using power generated from solar panels into a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen gasses ― an excellent combustible rocket propellant. The spacecraft spin acted like a centrifuge to separate combustible gasses from the inert water in the propulsion tanks.

The secondary technology demonstration was optical navigation using inexpensive cameras, computer vision, and math to determine where the Cislunar Explorers CubeSat was in space. Navigation and attitude data obtained from the spacecraft by capturing pictures of the Sun, Moon, and Earth and applying image recognition using an onboard computer would be compared with flight heritage solutions to characterize the reliability of optical navigation.

Historically, the Cislunar Explorers mission was a pair of L-shaped 3U CubeSats that won NASA’s CubeQuest Challenge in 2016 to secure a coveted launch spot on NASA’s SLS as part of the Artemis I mission. After extensive analysis, the team concluded that both mission objectives would be better achieved as a 12U CubeSat. The new selected trajectory configuration for Cislunar Explorers was to start in GTO and raise apogee until the spacecraft escapes Earth’s SOI.