{"id":165010,"date":"2025-12-03T00:17:09","date_gmt":"2025-12-03T00:17:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/165010\/"},"modified":"2025-12-03T00:17:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-03T00:17:09","slug":"making-multiple-breakthroughs-in-spacecraft-swarms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/165010\/","title":{"rendered":"Making multiple breakthroughs in spacecraft swarms"},"content":{"rendered":"

Each year, SpaceNews selects the people, programs and technologies that have most influenced the direction of the space industry in the past year. Started in 2017, our annual celebration recognizes outsized achievements in a business in which no ambition feels unattainable. This year\u2019s winners of the 8th annual SpaceNews Icon Awards<\/a> were announced and celebrated at a Dec. 2 ceremony hosted at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C. Congratulations to all of the winners and finalists<\/a>.<\/p>\n

NASA\u2019s four-satellite Starling swarm was not designed for space domain awareness. The 14-kilogram cubesats were equipped with hardware and software to observe their relative positions, coordinate maneuvers and monitor Earth\u2019s ionosphere.<\/p>\n

But it became apparent soon after the swarm launched in July 2023 on a Rocket Lab Electron that the cubesat\u2019s onboard cameras were spotting satellites beyond the swarm.<\/p>\n

As a result, engineers quickly developed algorithms to maximize Starling\u2019s ability to track other satellites and space debris.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a matter of fact, our determination of the positional accuracy of those objects was better than the catalogs,\u201d Roger Hunter, who manages NASA\u2019s Small Spacecraft Technology Program, said in a recent interview. \u201cIt is a dramatic opportunity for us to do a better job of space tracking, merging the observations from a system like Starling with what comes from the [U.S. Space Force] 18th and 19th Space Defense Squadrons and LeoLabs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Starling\u2019s success does not rest on a single technological breakthrough but on a series of innovations in mesh networking, independent decision-making and vision-based navigation. Taken together, the technologies could someday help a swarm of dozens of satellites provide position, navigation and timing services at the moon.<\/p>\n

In the near term, Starling\u2019s mission is continuing to evolve. Since the original mission wrapped up in May 2024, NASA and partners, including Blue Canyon Technologies, CesiumAstro, Emergent Space Technologies, L3Harris Technologies and Stanford University\u2019s Space Rendezvous Laboratory, have pushed the envelope of satellite autonomy through the extended mission, Starling 1.5, which is now scheduled to conclude in December 2026.<\/p>\n

In early 2025, Starling managers updated satellite software to enhance the swarm\u2019s ability to share responsibilities and make decisions. They also tested strategies for preventing conjunctions among autonomously maneuvering satellites.<\/p>\n

SpaceX worked with NASA to design a conjunction-screening tool that allows satellite operators to submit trajectories, receive conjunction updates and notify parties of their intent to maneuver. Then, Starling autonomously planned and executed maneuvers to steer clear of Starlink broadband satellites.<\/p>\n

It was \u201cthe first demonstration of a collaborative space traffic management system between two different types of spacecraft,\u201d Hunter said. That\u2019s important because traffic in low Earth orbit is picking up, and many new satellites are designed for autonomous maneuvering.<\/p>\n

In addition, Starling satellites have shown they can react to scientific phenomena with minimal input from operators on the ground. GPS receivers on Starling cubesats detect charged particles, which prompts the swarm to modify cubesat orbits to study regions of particularly high or low ionospheric density.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe spacecraft can detect something, talk with each other and decide how to collect information,\u201d Hunter said. \u201cThis is why Starling is important. It allows us to finally start making ourselves more independent of control centers.\u201d<\/p>\n

This article first appeared in the December 2025 issue of SpaceNews Magazine<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tRelated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Each year, SpaceNews selects the people, programs and technologies that have most influenced the direction of the space…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":165011,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[40074,98657,85,46,3442,3443,98658,125],"class_list":{"0":"post-165010","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-from-the-magazine","9":"tag-icon-awards","10":"tag-il","11":"tag-israel","12":"tag-nasa","13":"tag-sn","14":"tag-starling","15":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165010"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165010\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/165011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}