By Samuel Low July 5, 2023
Image Courtesy of NASA
SLAB is extremely excited about the upcoming launch of the NASA Starling Formation Flying mission! The spacecraft are planned to launch no earlier than July 14 aboard Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket from Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex 1 facility in Mahia, New Zealand. Starling will play a crucial role in advancing autonomous guidance, navigation and control algorithms for spacecraft swarms.
The Stanford Space Rendezvous Laboratory (SLAB) is privileged to play a critical role in developing the upcoming Starling Formation-Flying Optical Experiment (StarFOX). StarFOX is a core payload of the NASA Starling mission (2023) and intends to be the first demonstration of distributed, autonomous angles-only navigation for spacecraft swarms.
StarFOX applies SLAB's state-of-the-art Absolute and Relative Trajectory System (ARTMS), a complete multi-observer multi-target angles-only navigation architecture which consists of three core tasks and related new algorithms: (1) target detection and tracking, (2) initial batch orbit determination, and (3) sequential filtering for orbit refinement. SLAB has also pioneered new algorithms for rapid angles-only initial orbit determination and has demonstrated ARTMS in high fidelity simulations in geosynchronous orbits and beyond.
The future of spacecraft swarming is getting exciting!
Samuel Low is a PhD candidate in the Stanford Space Rendezvous Lab
