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Spaceflight Formation Flying Test Bed Takes Off
coondoggie writes "Getting complicated systems onboard a single spacecraft to operate as one integrated unit can be hard enough, but some space agencies are trying to address the challenges of getting multiple spacecraft to fly in formation and operate together as one unit. Such challenges are exactly what a new European Space Agency lab in the Netherlands is set to address. The test bed addresses crucial operational factors for formation flying, including mission and vehicle management, guidance navigation, dealing with faults and communicating between satellites."
Their most recent direction has a decidedly "open source" feel to it ... and you still have a chance to submit proposals:
http://www.darpa.mil/news/2010/SystemF6NewsRelease.pdf
My friend Debbie Ann is so promiscuous, instead of an appointment book she needs a package manager
At first glance all I can think of is Serta Sleepers being thrown into space.
Liftoff! We have liftoff of Stainy One, ushering in America's new in-orbit dumping of unwanted mattresses. Next month will see the launch of Smelly Two.
Man, you must just about have an anurism every time you read "space flight".
Bottom line,. people will use the term fly. get use to it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Spacecraft do not "fly". I'm not nitpicking; there is a pretty big difference. It's just plain intellectual laziness on his part.
Nope, ignorance on yours. Spacecraft do indeed fly. Flying has nothing to do with wings or aerodynamic forces, it has to do with moving without touching the ground. There are certainly other terms for how spacecraft move -- which depend on the particular spacecraft and what they're doing -- but even pure ballistic flight (aka "orbit") is still flight.
-- Alastair
it's incredibly complex, and will be needed for robotic swarms. Imagine trying to keep 1000 robots in formation with each other without have an unexpected event start to cascade thought the swarm and cause a formation collapse.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
why do they need to be in tight formation? a voltron style bot? well i guess something like each bot has a mirror, and they are making a huge telescope, but i fail to see how thats better than just using a rigid structure in the first place. bolt it together so it can be put together by 6 bots, and then taken back down the same way, and be hauled "up" in pieces.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
So when swimming under water, you're actually flying under water?
Especially Penguins fly under water.
Wasn't this solved in Galaga?
[Formations] arguably are not relevant in space...or at least i fail to see the relevance from any standpoint other than purely tactical. The only thing spacecraft require is an understanding of eachothers location, and an understanding of the location of objects around them. a significantly well developed computer program would certainly be capable of tracking this information
Disregarding the fairly major difficulty of accurately determining the location of objects around them (not to mention the nontrivial bit of understanding its own location), they also need to have an understanding of the velocity and acceleration as well. In space, moving in one direction doesn't mean what you think it means. If one accelerates in the direction of motion, it will take longer to orbit the Earth. If two satellites at the same altitude are traveling parallel to each other in the same direction, they will collide in 1/4th of an orbit. There's a reason that there was a spacecraft recently whose sole purpose was to demonstrate autonomous rendezvous.
If that still sounds simple, now add a dozen satellites, and realize you can't just make them fly in the same formation all the time. The fuel requirements for stationkeeping of the outermost satellites would be astronomical. You have to minimize course corrections if you want a reasonable mission lifetime. Or carry a great deal of fuel, which can easily defeat the purpose of using smaller spacecraft in the first place. On top of that, when you need to apply collision avoidance maneuvers, you have to make sure you don't put yourself onto a collision course with the other 10 satellites.
As for the purpose of formation flying (note we're talking about the cluster kind - the trailing formations are fairly straightforward):
Wikipedia
Apparently I must be dumb as a rock as it would seem to me that several jets flying information have the same problem as satellites traveling together. Speed, position and collision avoidance seem to be old issues to me. I wonder if the government actually farmed out money to grow a solution? Am I a dummy or what goes here?
The US Navy has quite some experience (decades, actually) with formation flying with their NOSS (Naval Ocean Surveillance System) SIGINT satellites (http://www.satobs.org/noss.html). The old one flew in tight triangular formations of three (quite a sight to see), the newer ones do it with two. They serve to pinpoint ships based on their radio communications.
Also, the Chinese appear to be experimenting with a similar concept (http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2010/08/china-launches-military-satellite-yaogan-weixing-10/).
Here are two pictures I shot of two of the newer NOSS formations, NOSS 3-4 launched in 2007 and NOSS 3-2 launched in 2003:
http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b176/marcoaliaslama/satellites/170109NOSS3_4.jpg
http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b176/marcoaliaslama/satellites/131208NOSS3_2.jpg
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