An Open Benchmark of One Million High-Fidelity Cislunar Trajectories

Cislunar space spans from geosynchronous altitudes to beyond the Moon and will underpin future exploration, science, and security operations. We describe and release an open dataset of one million numerically propagated cislunar trajectories generated with the open-source Space Situational Awareness Python package (SSAPy). The model includes high-degree Earth/Moon gravity, solar gravity, and Earth/Sun radiation pressure; other planetary gravities are omitted by design for computational efficiency. Initial conditions uniformly sample commonly used osculating-element ranges, and each trajectory is propagated for up to six years under a single, fixed start epoch. The dataset is intended as a reusable benchmark for method development (e.g., space domain awareness, navigation, and machine learning pipelines), a reference library for statistical studies of orbit families, and a starting point for community-driven extensions (e.g., alternative epochs). We report empirically observed stability trends (e.g., a band near 5 GEO and persistence of some co-orbital classes including L4/L5 librators) as dataset descriptors rather than new dynamical results. The chief contribution is the scale, fidelity, organization (CSV/HDF5 with full state time series and metadata), and open availability, which together lower the barrier to comparative and data-driven studies in the cislunar regime.

💡 Research Summary

The paper presents a publicly released benchmark dataset comprising one million high‑fidelity cislunar trajectories, generated with the open‑source Space Situational Awareness Python package (SSAPy). The authors model the Earth–Moon system using high‑degree gravity fields (EGM2008 and GRGM1200A up to degree and order 180), include solar gravity, and account for Earth‑ and Sun‑directed radiation pressure. Perturbations from other planets are deliberately omitted to keep the computational load tractable while still capturing the dominant non‑two‑body forces that can cause kilometer‑scale deviations over months to years.

Initial conditions are drawn uniformly from ranges that span the practical cislunar domain: semi‑major axis a between geosynchronous orbit (≈4.216 × 10⁷ m) and twice the lunar distance (≈7.688 × 10⁸ m), eccentricity e∈