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Air Force Research Lab awards $76 million for lunar experimentation – By Courtney Albon (Defense News) / Nov 10, 2022
WASHINGTON — The Air Force Research Laboratory chose Colorado-based Advanced Space to build a spacecraft that will observe, detect and track objects around the moon.
The space services company won a $76 million contract for AFRL’s Oracle program, which will develop sensing, navigation and communication technology along with algorithms that could support situational awareness in cislunar orbit. Cislunar refers to the area between geostationary orbit — about 22,000 miles above the Earth’s surface — and the moon.
“Our primary goals for the program are to advance techniques to detect previously unknown objects through search and discovery, to detect small or distant objects and to study spacecraft positioning and navigation in the [beyond GEO] realm,” Oracle’s principal investigator James Frith said in a Nov. 10 statement.
The contract for Oracle, which was previously named the Cislunar Highway Patrol System, comes amid a growing interest in the cislunar environment and increasing concerns about potential deep-space threats from adversaries like China. In response, AFRL and other stakeholders are crafting a classified roadmap that lays out the cislunar capabilities various space agencies are pursuing.
