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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."
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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"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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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."
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.
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.
In 1991, DSI (now bought by Orbital Sciences) built a series of similar-sized satellites for Darpa, named Microsat aka SCS.
... it was flying in formation, but not too sophisticated.
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
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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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.