Slashdot Mirror
DARPA Fractionated Spacecraft Program Starts
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."
I for one, welcome our new free-flying fractionated overlords. Especially if they turn out looking like Summer Glau...
This product is brought to you by the letter 'F'.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
If you ignore the "...Will probably change the face of sattelites for the better, if you ignore that they might decide to wipe out humanity at any given time..."
Dude, gives a whole new meaning to "the threat of hacking"
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
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.
In soviet russia, snarky chiches post you, you insensitive clod!
Could it be because (a) very few of us are rocket scientists or have the necessary background to comment intelligently on such a topic, or (b) the original post itself had the snarky Skynet quip, and as such, one good turn deserves another?
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Holy shit, do the editors even read the articles anymore?
/. isn't playing the digg game, then what the hell are the editors actually doing with their time?
The submission is just a blatant ripoff of the gizmodo article it links to, which in turn is incredibly vague and sensationalist without any real content whatsoever.
If
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
this is, for all intents and purposes, the same article as this
Fantastically fabricated, these fierce forebears of flowing fairy finesse fire forth fast fletchettes, forcing the faithful few to focus their fears: friend or foe? But fah, I forstall. In short, you may call them "F".
ceci n'est pas une
*sigh* I'm waiting for the whatcouldpossiblygowrong tag to show up.
I know it's been said before but it seems like lately there has been a lot of fear mongering going on in the world. I understand when I see it on TV; all the soccer moms of the world need to know the latest threat to their little angels.
But Slashdot should be better than this. Every time an article comes up that mentions AI, virusses, bacteria, censorship, anything remotely threatening it gets the fear mongering going.
Here, we have a developement that could save millions of dollars worth of launch costs; yet we fear it because... why exactly? It might spontaneously gain intelligence and attack the human race? Someone might hack it and tell it to attack? Attack using what exactly? I hope that the poster was joking, but honestly, I doubt it.
DARPA's Future, Fast, Flexible, Fractionated, Free-Flying Spacecraft United by Information Exchange space technology program.
Remember back in the old days when there was one monster mainframe that served all the users and access to it was tightly controlled? Then we discovered the wonders of having thousands of smaller computers all networked together, giving incredible flexibility and scaling?
That's what this is for satellites. Instead of having billion-dollar single point failures floating around in space, DARPA is trying to develop the technologies to have constellations of tens, hundreds, thousands of smaller satellites working together in an integrated mesh network. A network that can be improved by launching new nodes with upgraded features, one with fault tolerance in case of node failure.
F6 is one of the precursor technologies to be able to do this. And yes, like many things in space it can be used for evil purposes just as it can be used for good."Trying is only the first step towards failure." - Homer