We recently held a small ‘public relations day’ for the Starling mission, where I was fortunate enough to visit NASA Ames and see the four spacecraft we’ve all been working on for the past few years. Dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic has been tricky at times (from a communication or teamwork perspective, let alone everything else), so it was great to meet a bunch of the Starling team members in person! Special thanks to Philip and Sonny who managed to get me a visit as a foreign national at pretty short notice.
The first thing to notice is that our satellites are pretty tiny, all things considered! Each Starling unit is a “6U” CubeSat, where a “U” is a 10x10x10cm cube, so each spacecraft is slightly bigger than a shoebox. The idea behind CubeSats is to take advantage of miniaturisation and standardisation, making spacecraft cheaper and easier to build and overall much more accessible. CubeSats can still pack a lot into a very small volume, including propulsion systems, attitude control systems, cameras, batteries, processors, radios… which makes sense, when you think about how much a tiny mobile phone can do these days.
Above, you can see the solar panels in their unfolded configuration; they’re initially stowed for launch, then unfold in space. You might also notice this unit is labelled – the four spacecraft have been given nicknames of Inky, Pinky, Blinky and Clyde, echoing the ghosts from Pac-Man. They’re currently hanging out in the Integration & Testing clean room where both software and hardware are undergoing pre-launch verification.
There remains a lot of testing to do before launch and the Integration & Testing team are extremely busy (partly due to us). Apart from day-in-the-life tests, there are plans for swarm communication tests – to check that the spacecraft can talk to each other correctly and perform some of the more ambitious planned experiments – and night-time camera tests for StarFOX. This will let us verify that the cameras are working, are calibrated, and can provide adequate measurements for our swarm navigation experiment. So far, that verification has been a “non-trivial” process… but that’s for a future post to talk about.
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