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 […]
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 […]
Our next big StarFOX milestone is “day in the life” (DITL) testing, where for the first time, StarFOX software will be run on Starling satellites at NASA Ames for a full 24-hour test period. The goal of DITL testing is to go through – as the name suggests – a typical day in the life […]
This past week, we presented initial results of applying ARTMS navigation in lunar orbit at the ION International Technical Meeting in Long Beach. ARTMS, or the Absolute and Relative Trajectory Measurement System, is the multi-spacecraft autonomous navigation architecture for StarFOX. StarFOX will test ARTMS in low Earth orbit, but ARTMS itself can be generalised to […]
Part 1: Purpose The paradigm of space technology is shifting from large, single, expensive spacecraft towards groups of smaller, cheaper spacecraft which intelligently cooperate to achieve challenging objectives. This creates many potential benefits in terms of flexibility, coverage and performance of space systems, with applications as diverse as distributed science, communications, positioning, space domain awareness, […]
Below is a summary of some of my work and interests, as of May 2023. I encourage you to instead download the up-to-date PDF version here, which is current for March 2025. Objective I’ve always been inspired by the promise of space and the many ways in which it can move humanity forward. My work […]
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