The Moon’s next space station can hunt for dangerous space junk using its internet antennas as high-powered radar.
April 14, 2026
Original Paper
CisLunarSense: Opportunistic ISAC for Debris Detection at the Lunar Gateway
arXiv · 2604.10807
The Takeaway
Instead of launching multi-million dollar dedicated sensors, this repurposes existing communication hardware on the Lunar Gateway to detect tiny, fast-moving debris. It provides a massive 36-decibel sensing advantage over trying to track those same objects from Earth.
From the abstract
We propose CisLunarSense, an opportunistic integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) framework that exploits the Lunar Gateway's Ka-band relay for monostatic debris detection, addressing the absence of cislunar space situational awareness infrastructure beyond the reach of ground-based radars. Using NASA/ESA-documented system parameters with author-selected sensing settings and a CR3BP-based 9:2 near-rectilinear halo orbit model, we derive the orbit-phase-dependent Cramér--Rao bound under OFDM