DARPA Fractionated Spacecraft Program Starts

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday March 4, 2008 @09:01AM from the better-them-than-us dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Start buying Cold War nuclear shelters and piling up the canned food, because Boeing Advanced Systems has started System F6: 'DARPA's Future, Fast, Flexible, Fractionated, Free-Flying Spacecraft United by Information Exchange space technology program.' In other words: multiple, networked specialized spacecraft swarms that are intelligent enough to perform a single coordinated task together, like analyzing the crops or deciding to destroy humanity, Skynet-style. Actually, it could completely change satellites for the better, according to some experts."

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Two probable early applications by Anonymous Coward · 2008-03-04 09:10 · Score: 5, Interesting

1.) Improved station-keeping to allow greater numbers of satellites to operate safely in space. In particular, multiple satellites could navigate as a group, maintaining their positions relative to each other and therefore occupying only one "slot" in orbit.

2.) Synthetic apertures. NASA is planning a future mission using station-keeping or physically separated mirros to create an ultra-high resolution telescope. The idea is already used in ground scopes (and the basic principles are used in the F-22's radar). This can also be applied to increasing the resolution of topographic maps and of satellite imagery.