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Satellite Clusters Go Into Space
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."
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."
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.