With more and more missions around the Moon, a communication/navigation constellation around the Moon is necessary. Halo orbits, due to their unique geometry, are extensively studied by researchers for this purpose. A dedicated survey is carried out in this work to analyse the coverage ability of halo orbits. It is found that a two-satellite constellation is enough for continuous one-fold coverage of the north or the south polar regions but never both. A three-satellite constellation is enough for continuous one-fold coverage of both north and south polar regions. A four-satellite constellation can cover nearly 100% of the whole lunar surface. In addition, the coverage ability of another special orbit – distant retrograde orbit (DRO) – is analysed for the first time in this study. It is found that three satellites on DROs can cover 99·8% of the lunar surface, with coverage gaps at polar caps. A four-satellite constellation moving on spatial DROs can cover nearly the whole lunar surface. By combining halo orbits and DROs, we design a five-satellite constellation composed of three halo orbit satellites and two DRO satellites. This constellation can provide 100% continuous one-fold coverage of the whole lunar surface.

In this paper, a simplified constellation architecture consisting of only two navigation satellites located around the Earth-Moon L1,2 libration points is obtained for the Universe Lighthouse. In order to determine the feasible constellations that can achieve continuous global coverage for lunar orbits, an exhaustive search over all possible combinations of libration point orbits is performed first. With the use of a fitting procedure, amplitude relations between the feasible L1 and L2 libration point orbits are derived by polynomial interpolation. After that, a cislunar navigation simulation is conducted to verify the navigation performance of the candidate two-satellite constellations. The final Monte Carlo simulation results indicate that the simplified system is available for cislunar navigation and the best accuracy of a few tens of metres can be achieved for both the trans-lunar cruise phase and lunar orbit phase.