StarFOX flight results from distributed cooperative vision of targets
Have you ever seen satellites talking to each other, exchanging bearing angle camera measurements from commonly visible targets (potentially unknown and adversarial), and use them to determine the orbits of these targets as well as refining their own absolute orbit simultaneously? Well, all this is happening on the impressive NASA Starling swarm mission, certainly for the first time in published literature. Recall the news on Chinese satellites allegedly dogfighting in space? That's a piece of cake in comparison. The attached video shows actual flight results from the Starling Formation-Flying Experiment (StarFOX) created by the Stanford Space Rendezvous Laboratory and operated with the help of NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration Ames Research Center.
Most recent publication:
Justin Kruger, D'Amico, S.;
On-Orbit Performance and Lessons Learned for Autonomous Angles-Only Navigation of a Satellite Swarm;
IEEE Aerospace Conference, Big Sky, Montana, March 2025.
Legend:
*The 3D plot on the left shows the motion of spacecraft 2 (blue) and 3 (red) with respect to spacecraft 4 (green) in the co-moving orbital frame with origin at spacecraft 4. Note the distortions with respect to ellipses due to the large distances up to 150 km. The dashed segments indicate times when angle measurements to targets are exchanged between satellites.
*The images on top are obtained by the star-trackers on-board the three spacecraft. Note how many objects are visible besides stars and the tracked Starling satellites.
*The plots below show the absolute orbit determination accuracy of spacecraft 4 in green (compared with the reference truth from GPS ex-post) obtained from angles-only measurements (no GPS).
*The plots at the bottom show the relative orbit determination accuracy of spacecraft 2 (blue) and 3 (red) with respect to spacecraft 4, with large improvement compared with a single observer scenario.
