NASA's Starling spacecraft get into swarm operations configuration

NASA's Starling spacecraft, a team of four CubeSats flying into orbit around Earth, have completed commissioning and are now in swarm experiment configuration that can function as an autonomous community, capable of responding to their environment and completing tasks as a team.

The spacecraft, Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde, are designed to test out key technologies for the future of deep space missions including:

• autonomously maneuvering to stay together as a team
• creating an adaptable communications network amongst the spacecraft
• keeping track of each other’s relative position
• responding to new information from onboard sensors by executing new activities on their own.

"A swarm of spacecraft is also more resilient against failures or malfunctions within the team as each spacecraft is redundant to another. If one fails, the others can compensate," NASA says.

Our four Starling spacecraft - Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde - have successfully completed commissioning and are now in swarm experiment configuration! 🛰️🛰️🛰️🛰️More about the mission: https://t.co/SwIk56t6Hw pic.twitter.com/VBiHr7VyNl

— NASA Ames (@NASAAmes) December 15, 2023

The Starling mission will test ROMEO (Reconfiguration and Orbit Maintenance Experiments Onboard) software designed to autonomously plan and execute maneuvers without any direct input from the ground. The software will allow the Starling satellites to fly in a cluster, both planning out trajectories and executing them on their own.

Another experiment onboard the mission is a Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) communications system that determines the best way to route traffic through the network of satellites. Starling will test this network to demonstrate whether the system can automatically create and maintain a network in space over time.

Next up, the StarFOX (Starling Formation-Flying Optical Experiment) star tracker sensors will allow the backdrop of the stars to keep the swarm together.

Further, the Distributed Spacecraft Autonomy (DSA) experiment is designed to showcase the ability of a swarm of spacecraft to collect and analyze science data onboard and cooperatively optimize data collection in response. The satellites will monitor Earth's ionosphere and if one detects something interesting, it will communicate to the other satellites to observe the same phenomenon.