Spacebased autonomous situational awareness to a completely new level!
We have just delivered the flight software for StarFOX+, aka the Starling Formation-Flying Experiment Plus. The new experiment will commence at the end of February. Besides various improvement in robustness and performance based on lessons learned from the first year of the mission, StarFOX+ features brand-new vision-based capabilities, including
- Autonomous identification and tracking of Resident Space Objects (RSO) based on the most recently uploaded space object catalogue
- Autonomous initial orbit determination of RSOs based on multiple simultaneous observers exchanging bearing angles measurements through cross-links without a-priori info of the RSOs
- Autonomous sequential estimation of force and sensor model parameters, such as differential clock-offsets, differential ballistic coefficients, camera biases
The video below shows results of StarFOX+ as evaluated on the ground on flight images collected during the mission. The legend describes what objects are autonomously identified and the source of data, from the catalog (SGP4), from GPS (when available) and from visual observations (camera).
Shoutout to the team at the Stanford Space Rendezvous Laboratory and specifically Justin Kruger and Mike Timmerman for the terrific job.
