Big news: NASA Starling is currently conducting experiments in orbit!
Starling was launched from the Māhia Peninsula in New Zealand on July 17, 2023, on board a Rocket Lab Electron vehicle. The swarm was successfully deployed into an approximately sun-synchronous low Earth orbit and soon began initial commissioning operations. Satellites SV2, SV3 and SV4 completed initial bus commissioning by July 21, whereas SV1 encountered several initial difficulties, including weaker-than-expected radio communications and a propulsion system leak. Commissioning was completed on December 12, 2023, when the swarm first achieved nominal inter-satellite separations between all four spacecraft. Official updates are regularly provided by the NASA Small Satellites blog.
Continued complications with SV1 have meant that StarFOX experiments thus far have only involved SV2, SV3 and SV4. In addition, the initial SV1 propulsion leak created an unexpectedly large relative orbit with respect to the other satellites with a relative eccentricity vector of approximately 10 km. This led to challenging visibility conditions, in which SV1 would frequently exit of the FOV of the other observers at the nominal inter-satellite distance of 70 km, or would otherwise be too distant and dim to be detected by the camera. With all that said, though… StarFOX has successfully conducted swarm angles-only navigation in orbit! These are the first demonstrations of this kind of capability in flight, and we hope to improve things in future experiments via additional tuning and software patches.
The video below presents the first optical relative navigation flight results for a swarm of spacecraft using only inter-satellite bearing angles. On the left, photographs are taken every minute by one spacecraft of the Starling swarm, and visible objects are classified as other swarm members, stars, or background clutter. Two swarm members are visible and their angular positions in the image are used to estimate their relative orbits, shown on the right. Initial orbit errors (lines) and formal uncertainties (shaded regions) are reduced over time as new angle measurements are obtained by the camera and processed sequentially. Even under very challenging conditions, due to inconsistent target illumination (eclipses) and minimal target motion, the angles-only Absolute and Relative Trajectory Measurement System (ARTMS) is able to demonstrate relative navigation to multiple resident space objects using only inter-satellite bearing angles matching accuracy from on-ground hardware-in-the-loop tests.
The next video extends this to a single-observer single-target case (top, processed on the ground using flight images) and a multi-target multi-observer multi-target case (bottom, processed entirely on-board in real time). BWOAH! Pretty cool.
Anyway, this is all incredibly exciting, and I’m hoping to dive into these results in more detail soon!
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