# A Study of Cislunar-Based Small Satellite Constellations with Sustainable Autonomy
## 6 Discussions
Section 5.2.1 presents the parametric analysis for the Moon's side of Cislunar operations. These are the ones with the utmost critical operations, as the Moon's orbital region is still not fully known as well as how the parameters behave in their orbital space in these competent and highly demanding times. Missions will be growing significantly towards the Moon for strategic settlement on the surface as well as in the orbits. Two major orbital regions were explored in this paper: Lower Lunar Orbits (LLOs) and Medium Lunar Orbits (MLOs). These have high exploration value, as the Gateway will take its position in the NRHO for crewed landings at the South Pole and other missions aim at similar regions to land as well as explore with satellites as well as rovers in the near future. Similar to Earth, the parameters of tracking remained the same but with due inclusion of the Gateway in NRHO. Figure 10(a) shows the Along arc, In-track, range among the satellites autonomously maintaining and managing operations. Figure 10(c) shows the significance of the Along, Radial, and Cross-track separations among the satellites to track them and maintain alignment strongly to seamlessly operate the constellation. The small satellites are resource-constrained through cost-effective. Hence, a balance in autonomy in the proposed methodology is specified with respect to the Moon's orbital operations. This is because the operations over the Moon are significantly tougher to maintain for a longer duration of time. This is not only to perform the mission objectives but also to have robust communications with Earth in continuity along with the variations of the Gateway in NRHO. The significance of observing all these satellites and the Gateway in one frame of the plot is of high importance for regular operations monitoring on the ground. Elaborating further, the main focus of this research is to support the missions like Artemis with dedicated small satellite constellations as a part of Cislunar operations. The Artemis-2 will get the Gateway station to the Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO) over the Moon, and a large-scale operation will begin. This will extend the scope of the small satellite constellations to reach out and form a strategic alignment with Artemis and to support the day-to-day operations, regularly relaying data and information regarding the scientific and technological experiment. This is why the words \"robust communications\" are emphasized for these prominent communications that will be crucial for Artemis to have sustained operations with enhanced support and assistance from these constellations. Also, as the small satellites are resource constrained due to their smaller size and mass, there is a need to balance this deficit with a good balance of autonomy by extending their special supporting features and synergized methodology, which will help the constellations to thrive for a long period of time. This is a major ethos of this paper calling for sustained autonomy in the Cislunar space. Figure 11b is a slight variation giving continuous Radial projection separations of each satellite in the constellation. It can be observed that they have a pattern of variation in the projections over the elapsed time of propagation. This is due to the orientation of the satellites with respect to the others during the constellation design and its configuration, as shown in Tables 1 and 2. The major significance of this pattern is to observe that satellites do not overlap one another's orbital positioning and retain their states as designed. These deflect when the perturbations occur, but they recover and come back to the original pattern of their orientation, which is satisfactory from the operations point of view. The role of inclination sometimes gets overshadowed by the semi-major axis. But in the case of the Moon, this is absolutely critical to continuously monitor and assess the variations in inclination with other parameters.