2020 BRN Discussion, page-24582

How swarm spacecraft could help us understand earth like never before


“There are now some very smart people in Europe and around the world who have set themselves a challenge to miniaturise technology such that it can fit into a very small volume. People refer to it as thinking inside the box,” says Roger Walker from the European Space Agency (ESA).

That kind of thinking is starting to pay off. The CubeSat standard is cheap and it’s allowing many more missions to be developed than ever before. And as technology continues to shrink and new techniques are developed, more types of missions become possible – some of which were practically unimaginable until recently, such as satellite swarms.

Satellite swarms are dozens, hundreds or even thousands of tiny spacecraft all working together to do something that’s impossible or impractical with traditional spacecraft. Swarms containing such huge quantities of CubeSats can be envisioned because each one is so cheap to build.

Scott Williams is a programme director at SRI International, who was involved in the early development of CubeSats. He remembers thinking: “Okay, how many can we fly? What can we do with them? If we can get lots of measurement points in space, don’t we create a similar, or perhaps in some ways better, capability than a single, exquisite measurement from a trillion-dollar satellite?”

Williams realised that for many applications, the answer was a resounding yes. But how do you control a swarm of, say, 1,000 CubeSats?

“What you can’t do is have 1,000 operators in ground stations, individually keying in commands to each of the satellites,” he says. “It doesn’t scale financially; you have to be able to treat the network as a single entity.

“Once you have a single operator that runs your hundred-million-dollar constellation, then you achieve a real economy of scale and you’ve got an excellent economic advantage.” In practice, that means developing some level of artificial intelligence for the CubeSats so that they can guide themselves.

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