NASA’s new satellite experiment cuts out the middle man: humans
The army of Earth’s orbiting satellites continues to swell, but the latest batch from NASA will have a leg up on the others. They won’t have to rely on humans to tell them what to do.
The set of four small satellites are part of NASA’s Starling mission, which mission managers out of Ames Research Center in California said are designed to work as a “swarm.” They made it to space on a Rocket Lab launch from New Zealand late Monday and were successfully deployed overnight.
Their goal is to test out technology for positioning, networking, maneuvering and decision-making without any input from mission control, according to NASA’s mission overview.
“Starling, and the capabilities it brings for autonomous command and control for swarms of small spacecraft, will enhance NASA’s abilities for future science and exploration missions,” said program manager Roger Hunter with NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology program.
It’s the next step in robotic space exploration, which Hunter said will be key for deep-space missions that have the hurdle of delayed communication to and from Earth.
The six-month mission will see the four satellites deploying in two formations in low-Earth orbit of about 355 miles altitude and spaced out about 40 miles from one another.
Managers want to see if the Starling satellites can stay together as a group, communicate with one another autonomously, keep track of the other satellites’ positions and respond to new information via their onboard sensors allowing them to react on their own.
This lays the groundwork for larger swarms to do larger tasks, build their own networks, and even repair themselves if necessary.
And since they are acting as identical, redundant robots, if one fails, the others can pick up the slack, NASA says.
The four technologies being tested on the mission are called:
ROMEO (Reconfiguration and Orbit Maintenance Experiments Onboard), which allows it to maneuver in space as it sees necessary.
MANET (Mobile Ad-hoc Network), which allows communication similar to a mesh Wi-Fi system dialing into multiple available signals and using the strongest as needed.
StarFOX (Starling Formation-Flying Optical Experiment), star tracker sensors that also track neighboring satellites so the swarm can stick together.
DSA (Distributed Spacecraft Autonomy) allows the satellites to gather and share data among the swarm, specifically tracking Earth’s ionosphere on this test mission, so that if one finds something worth noting, it will tell the other satellites so they can also focus their attention on it.
In addition to its primary mission, NASA’s Starling swarm will attempt to talk to SpaceX’s constellation of Starlink satellites.
The partnership is geared toward space traffic management so satellites can be aware of one another, even if they’re from differing companies and governments.
According to public domain data on the website orbit.ing-now.com, as of July 18, there were 8,230 objects in orbit, of which 7,437 are in low-Earth orbit.
SpaceX makes up a lion’s portion of that having launched more than 4,400 of its Starlink satellites that provide broadband service on Earth. While thousands more Starlinks are coming, Amazon’s forthcoming Project Kuiper also looks to compete with SpaceX with planned launches of more than 3,200 in the next five years while other satellite companies such as OneWeb have sizable constellations as well.
Estimates in 2022 from the U.S. Government Accountability Office predicted nearly 60,000 more satellites would be launched into low-Earth orbit before the end of the decade.
NASA’s experiment is one way that the satellites can play nice together.
“Starling 1.5 will be foundational for helping understand rules of the road for space traffic management,” Hunter said.
