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Satellite Clusters Go Into Space

Posted by michael on from the synchronized-orbiting dept.

prostoalex writes "This Thursday Payload Systems will launch its first set of volleyball-sized satellites from a launching pad in Kazakhstan. The SPHERES (Synchronized Position Hold, Engage & Reorient Experiment Satellites) is a joint project between Payload and MIT. The satellites can fly in formation, share information with one another, and help other satellites with refueling and repairs."

28 comments

  1. collisions by hawkbug · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Yes, but with more and more crap being thrown into space, you have to wonder about the very real possibility that things will start to run into each other and cause massive problems down the road...

    1. Re:collisions by jarda · · Score: 4, Interesting

      That's why satellite grids are useful. If there's many satellites in the grid, they're much more redundant against collisions, since losing one or two satellites out of twenty shouldn't have that catastrophic consequences.

      Besides, I hope space agencies are alreadz smart enugh at least not to put more debris on low earth orbit intentionally.

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  2. Cool by Dancin_Santa · · Score: 1, Funny

    How fortuitous it was that the name of the satellites made up a perfect acronym. What are the odds!?

    1. Re:Cool by zero_offset · · Score: 0, Troll

      Modded Redundant, but you were the first one to joke about this. You got screwed.

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  3. Energizer or Duracell? by Hungus · · Score: 4, Funny

    "weigh less than eight pounds and are powered by AA batteries"

    heh hope they didn't go with radio shack brand.

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  4. Seriously... by StormForge · · Score: 1, Interesting

    What's the point? They talk about far future applications requiring formation flying. Sounds fine, but is formation flying really going to be the big challenge 20 years from now when we put a very-long-baseline replacement for Hubble up? I don't think so. Why research it now anyway? Just sounds like these guys wanted an excuse to goof around with cute little satellites. Am I being too cynical? Seems like there are better things to do with the brains, money and payload space.

    1. Re:Seriously... by barawn · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Sounds fine, but is formation flying really going to be the big challenge 20 years from now when we put a very-long-baseline replacement for Hubble up?

      The replacement for Hubble is the James Webb Space Telescope (also referred to as the NGST, for Next Generation Space Telescope). This is likely to be its replacement, the Terrestrial Planet Finder.

      Anyway, regarding formation flying: Have you ever done it? Fact is, it's hard to get -two- spacecraft to move into relative position to each other, much less 20 or 30. We've simply never done it, and the TPF is NOT the only place we'd want to do it. A gravitational wave telescope, for instance, would be wonderful in space (LISA, I believe, is/was its name) but the concerns were always "can we get satellites to stay within a small fraction of a wavelength of each other?"

      This project is designed to say "Yes, yes we can."

    2. Re:Seriously... by PD · · Score: 1

      What do you mean we've never gotten two spacecraft to move into relative position to each other?

      Gemini 6 and 7

      Also, check out the many many many Progress resupply missions to Mir and the ISS, and the Salyut stations. Lots of those were automated, no human control for the docking.

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    3. Re:Seriously... by lepton+noodle · · Score: 1
      The US Navy also launched a system named NOSS (Naval Ocean Surveilance System), which used a formation of satellites to determine positions of naval vessels through radio triangulation and time difference of arrival techniques.

      A small blurb on the system can be found here.

    4. Re:Seriously... by barawn · · Score: 1

      You know, I replied to my above message but didn't post it, because I figured "nah, everyone will know what I mean".

      I forget what the grammatical mistake is called, but anyway - the "We've simply never done it" referred to 20 or 30, not 2. Yes, we've done 2. 2 is hard. Not easy. Hard. That's why the Progress slammed into Mir once.

      20 or 30? That's much harder.

    5. Re:Seriously... by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 1

      I figured "nah, everyone will know what I mean"

      I thought it was obvious what you meant.

      But the easiest way to get Karma on Slashdot is to find a piece of someone's post you can misrepresent and jump down their throats with URL's and crass remarks. Apparently being an asshole makes you sound authoritative (in general, not necessarily the grandparent of this post).

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    6. Re:Seriously... by ckaminski · · Score: 1

      The Progress slammed into Mir because the human being on Mir controlling it forgot to account for some additional trash weight installed upon it, and didn't apply enough thrust to prevent the collision. Not a computers fault.

      But yes, 20 or 30 at micro/nanomater distances is a challenge. Pulling that off on earth with stationary objects is difficult enough.

    7. Re:Seriously... by barawn · · Score: 1

      Well, there are several reasons Progress slammed into Mir. The source that I had heard (granted, on the Discovery channel) said that one of the cosmonauts saw the problem, and relayed an incorrect direction because he didn't orient himself correctly.

      Granted, still not a computer's fault. But proof that navigating in 3D is difficult.

  5. MIT SPHERES site by MonkeyBoyo · · Score: 3, Informative

    don't know why this wasn't given in the writeup but here is the MIT SSL SPHERES site. And if you look at the pictures you will see that they are not spheres.

  6. It's obligatory, but... by FooAtWFU · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Imagine running a Beowulf cluster on these things! ...

    (I don't even know what a Beowulf cluster is, but it seemed to figure prominently in jokes for the Spray-On Computers story ;)

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  7. What is in a name? by cloudless.net · · Score: 2, Interesting
    "The SPHERES (Synchronized Position Hold, Engage & Reorient Experiment Satellites)"

    Does anyone else find this name awkward? As if they randomly picked words to make up the acronym. This seems to be the trend and people are trying too hard to be creative.

  8. DSI Microsat by morcheeba · · Score: 4, Informative

    In 1991, DSI (now bought by Orbital Sciences) built a series of similar-sized satellites for Darpa, named Microsat aka SCS.

    These were pretty simple - if I remember correctly, they didn't have much of an attitude control system. You can see tell this from the picture because the solar cells on all sides, and the antenna shown (one of two) is relatively omni-directional. I think they had some compressed gas for station keeping (they were supposed to be evenly spaced around the orbit) and/or creating spin ... it was flying in formation, but not too sophisticated.

    What troubles me is that the SPHERES have no solar cells. True, electronics take less power now, and LiIon batteries store more energy than our old NiCds, but radios will still take a few watts. I wonder what the life of their two test satellites will be, or if they just forgot to include the solar cells.

    We fully qualified 8 of our Microsat satellites, but only lauched seven. The left-over real satellite was a great marketing tool and cool show and tell piece to bring to schools.

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    1. Re:DSI Microsat by CXI · · Score: 1

      If you read the article, these are going to the ISS and will be tested inside of it.

    2. Re:DSI Microsat by morcheeba · · Score: 1

      Ah, my mistake. I thought they were going to go up on the ISS and then be released to free space orbit . It's an interesting start, but I'm sure they can't get that much far apart inside... I guess they'll be doing tight-formation flying, otherwise the test doesn't stress that much of the experiment. But, too much guessing - I should look up more detailed specs.

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  9. Trigger-happy tensionists? by Mirkon · · Score: 1

    Is it really a good idea to launch these things from the Middle East?

    "Hey Jim, whaddya make of those things?"
    "Hmm. Are we at war with that country?"
    "I dunno."
    "Oh well. Maybe we should shoot 'em down, y'know, just to be safe? They look uh... dangerous."

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    1. Re:Trigger-happy tensionists? by Mirkon · · Score: 1

      (looks at a map)

      Okay, so I was tired.

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  10. Sounds like a good start... by Transcendent · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Looks to me like we're coming into a new age of sattelites. Instead of just having sattelites orbit around, decompose, then fall into the atmosphere, we'll now have "helper" satellites that just go around and repair the others... like nano-bots in a system repairing the damaged components. This could possibly lead to little sattelites swarming around the ISS that will perform routine matenance.

    But who will repair the helper sattelites? One of his helper friends, of course.

  11. Sounds really cool. by WoTG · · Score: 1

    I'd love to see (highly accelerated) movies of these in action!

    I wonder if there are any groups working on similar, ground-based, technologies? I'm sure there are, but I'm too lazy to google right now...