NASA Satellite Swarm’s Expanded Mission Powers Smarter Operations

NASA continues to study how autonomy will assist future exploration to the Moon, Mars, and other worlds. As exploration continues to evolve, future spacecraft swarms will one day “see” and communicate with each other autonomously, navigating new destinations more efficiently.

The success of NASA’s Starling mission extension, called Starling 1.5+, shows greater autonomy in space missions can give spacecraft a higher degree of independence, allowing them to make decisions and coordinate actions without the constant oversight of human operators. Improving this technology opens doors to operating swarms of spacecraft farther from Earth, like at the Moon or Mars, where communications are limited, and autonomy could play a critical role.

Advancing autonomous communication

Enhancing autonomous control across the Starling swarm was a key objective of the extended mission. This summer, the swarm tested an updated version of Distributed Spacecraft Autonomy (DSA) software, which distributes autonomous responsibilities and decision-making across the swarm.

Operators allowed the swarm to use their crosslink radios to signal when a swarm member noticed spikes in the plasma density of Earth’s ionosphere. When a spacecraft observed this change, its radio was triggered to turn on and communicate the data to the rest of the swarm. Once in communication, the swarm would autonomously develop a collaborative observation plan.

“Giving the system the authority to control the hardware was another way to test its autonomy,” said Caleb Adams, project manager of DSA at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. “We’re continuing to integrate this software into more systems to give the swarm more distributed autonomy.”

To further test DSA’s ability to improve collaborative operations, the team tested the swarm’s capabilities to transfer large files. Using a method inspired by torrent technology, which breaks data into smaller chunks and distributes them across the swarm to enable more rapid file sharing, the swarm was able to receive and share large files, make autonomous software updates, check and verify information, exchange data, and perform other operations more efficiently.

The DSA software’s autonomous operations were supported by a reactive control language that allows spacecraft to operate autonomously based on predefined commands. Giving the swarm the ability to make decisions and perform complex tasks independently reduces the need for spacecraft to wait for commands from Earth, opening the door to deep space swarm operations.

A look around the orbital neighborhood

Spacecraft swarms need to maintain awareness of each spacecraft within their group, as well as their surrounding orbital environment. The StarFOX experiment aboard Starling 1.0 used low-cost, commercial star trackers to identify and track the individual spacecraft making up the swarm. In the expanded Starling 1.5+ experiment, the team also worked to identify and track other catalogued spacecraft and objects. The experiment included tracking and generating orbital estimates of the swarm’s “orbital neighbors” – a capability that’s crucial for more autonomous maneuvering in busy environments like low Earth orbit and beyond.

The expanded experiment used autoNGC, a new software designed by researchers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The software provides onboard navigation, guidance, and control functions, and can project orbital trajectories, providing targeted propulsion maneuvers to adjust orbits autonomously. When used together, StarFOX and autoNGC gave the Starling swarm better awareness of their surroundings and more autonomous control over their orbits and maneuvers.

“With StarFOX, a swarm can see each other as well as the objects around them, and with autoNGC, they can plan maneuvers to avoid those objects autonomously,” said Nathan Benz, project manager of Starling 1.5+ at NASA Ames. “We’re bringing all of these systems together to complement one another.”

Connecting autonomous operations

The success of the Starling 1.5+ experiment forges a path toward a future where spacecraft swarms operate with greater autonomy using combined technologies that allow for navigation, operation, and system management without constant human intervention.

As the Starling swarm continues to test autonomous operations, NASA is paving the way for future missions to support human exploration to the Moon and Mars while expanding our understanding of the universe.