Adversarial Pursuits in Cislunar Space

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Fotiadis, Filippos, Rommel, Quentin, Falco, Gregory, Topcu, Ufuk
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Fotiadis, Filippos
Rommel, Quentin
Falco, Gregory
Topcu, Ufuk
author_facet Fotiadis, Filippos
Rommel, Quentin
Falco, Gregory
Topcu, Ufuk
contents Cislunar space is becoming a critical domain for future lunar and interplanetary missions, yet its remoteness, sparse infrastructure, and unstable dynamics create single points of failure. Adversaries in cislunar orbits can exploit these vulnerabilities to pursue and jam co-located communication relays, potentially severing communications between lunar missions and the Earth. We study a pursuit-evasion scenario between two spacecraft in a cislunar orbit, where the evader must avoid a pursuer-jammer while remaining close to its nominal trajectory. We model the evader-pursuer interaction as a zero-sum adversarial differential game cast in the circular restricted three-body problem. This formulation incorporates critical aspects of cislunar orbital dynamics, including autonomous adjustment of the reference orbit phasing to enable aggressive evading maneuvers, and shaping of the evader's cost with the orbit's stable and unstable manifolds. We solve the resulting nonlinear game locally using a continuous-time differential dynamic programming variant, which iteratively applies linear-quadratic approximations to the Hamilton-Jacobi-Isaacs equation. We simulate the evader's behavior against both a worst-case and a linear-quadratic pursuer. Our results pave the way for securing future missions in cislunar space against emerging cyber threats.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_20330
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Adversarial Pursuits in Cislunar Space
Fotiadis, Filippos
Rommel, Quentin
Falco, Gregory
Topcu, Ufuk
Systems and Control
Cislunar space is becoming a critical domain for future lunar and interplanetary missions, yet its remoteness, sparse infrastructure, and unstable dynamics create single points of failure. Adversaries in cislunar orbits can exploit these vulnerabilities to pursue and jam co-located communication relays, potentially severing communications between lunar missions and the Earth. We study a pursuit-evasion scenario between two spacecraft in a cislunar orbit, where the evader must avoid a pursuer-jammer while remaining close to its nominal trajectory. We model the evader-pursuer interaction as a zero-sum adversarial differential game cast in the circular restricted three-body problem. This formulation incorporates critical aspects of cislunar orbital dynamics, including autonomous adjustment of the reference orbit phasing to enable aggressive evading maneuvers, and shaping of the evader's cost with the orbit's stable and unstable manifolds. We solve the resulting nonlinear game locally using a continuous-time differential dynamic programming variant, which iteratively applies linear-quadratic approximations to the Hamilton-Jacobi-Isaacs equation. We simulate the evader's behavior against both a worst-case and a linear-quadratic pursuer. Our results pave the way for securing future missions in cislunar space against emerging cyber threats.
title Adversarial Pursuits in Cislunar Space
topic Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20330