Communication Relay Satellites Constellation Assessment for Future Lunar Missions

The majority of the landing sites that have been proposed for NASA's eventual lunar return missions primarily focused on the regions around poles. Either the direct Line of Sight (LoS) to planet Earth is generally restricted from such locations or does not exist at all. To resolve such issues, communication relay satellites are necessitated for ensuring reliable continuous communication between lunar assets and the Earth. Several architectural explanations have been proposed by the Space Communication Architecture Working Group (SCAWG) of NASA and academia. Such proposed architectures vary in terms of constellation satellite count with an estimated cost in the range of billions of dollars. The research presented in this paper focuses on qualitative analysis of such proposed constellations in terms of delta-V and the cost to ascertain the best satellite constellation from an astrodynamics perspective.