CubeSats Showcase Autonomous Flight in NASA's Starling Mission: Orbital Dance

NASA’s Starling mission plans to test critical swarm technologies in space using a quartet of 6U CubeSats. Showcasing their ability to autonomously fly together, the CubeSats will perform an orbital dance in low Earth orbit. Positioned approximately 355 miles above Earth, the spacecraft will be spaced around 40 miles apart. Demonstrating their capacity to track each other’s positions and trajectory accurately is the goal. A step towards developing cost-effective and scalable distributed spacecraft missions is the Starling mission. It is crucial for autonomous operation for swarms operating at considerable distances from Earth.

Owing to communication time delays and potential disruptions, the Swarms need to function independently. Without guidance from mission controllers, the spacecraft will plan and execute activities as a unified group. The creation and maintenance of an inter-spacecraft communication network is the key technology being tested. The network of communications will automatically adjust to changing conditions. The network will reconfigure itself to ensure interrupted communication for the remaining operational swarm if one spacecraft’s communications node fails. The ability of spacecraft to work together and adapt to changing circumstances is showcased by the NASA’s Starling mission.

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CubeSats Showcase Autonomous Flight in NASA’s Starling Mission: Orbital Dance

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