ORCID Number

0009-0001-0404-7573

Date of Award

Summer 2026

Access Type

Thesis - Open Access

Degree Name

Master of Aerospace Engineering

Department

Aerospace Engineering

Committee Chair

David Canales Garcia

Committee Chair Email

canaled4@erau.edu

First Committee Member

Francisco Crespo Cutillas

First Committee Member Email

crespocf@erau.edu

Second Committee Member

Surabhi Bhadauria

Second Committee Member Email

bhadaurs@erau.edu

Third Committee Member

Scott Montgomery Martin

Third Committee Member Email

martis38@erau.edu

College Dean

James W. Gregory

Abstract

Expanding lunar missions require efficient, interoperable orbital tracking where existing methods fail to scale. Two-Line Elements (TLEs) lack applicability beyond geocentric regimes, while high-accuracy Orbit Ephemeris Messages (OEMs) require excessive data volumes and bandwidth to communicate. To support increased lunar traffic, this paper proposes the Compact Cislunar Orbital Representation (CCOR), providing a novel framework that strikes a balance between TLE level efficiency and OEM-level fidelity, ensuring multi-actor communication for missions in the cislunar region. By evaluating the framework across six diverse cislunar trajectories, this study demonstrates the CCOR’s robustness and ability to compress thousands of OEM state vectors into a minimal seven-parameter representation and initial epoch. Capable of being represented on the scale of bytes of data, the CCOR trumps OEMs, which are shown to require hundreds or thousands of kilobytes, in data efficiency while maintaining position errors on the order of a few kilometers and velocity errors consistently below 1 cm/s. Ultimately, the CCOR provides a lightweight, interoperable standard that mitigates the headaches associated with large data bottlenecks and dynamic system ambiguity, facilitating communication between commercial and international actors and enabling a scalable framework for real-time space situational awareness for current and future missions in the cislunar region.

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