NASA mission to test technology for satellite servants

PITTSBURGH – NASA’s mission slated to launch Friday will place three tiny satellites in Earth’s lower orbit, where they will show how satellites can detect and communicate with each other, setting the platform for partitions of thousands of small satellites that can work collaboratively. and independently.

Zac Manchester, assistant professor at the Carnegie Mellon University Institute of Robotics and chief mission researcher, said small satellites have become very popular over the past 10 years, as some companies already ‘put hundreds into orbit to perform tasks such as Earth images and weather forecasting. .

These satellites are now controlled separately from the ground. As swarms grow larger and more sophisticated, Manchester noted, they must respond to orders almost as a single entity. The new resolution, called V-R3x, will test technologies that could make that possible.

“This mission is a precursor to more advanced swimming abilities and the creation of autonomous flying,” Manchester said.

NASA is also interested in using clusters of small satellites outside of Earth. For example, separations of satellites around the moon could provide communications and navigation support for lunar exploration, including NASA’s Artemis program. It will be necessary for outside swarms to operate independently, Manchester said.

V-R3x, a technology demonstration mission funded by NASA’s Spacecraft Technology program, is implemented by a small group of engineers called Pay Accelerator for CubeSat Endeavors (PACE) at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. The group aims to design, develop and fly space tests faster and more cost-effectively.

V-R3x uses three so-called CubeSats to orbit the Earth. These standard 10-centimeter cubes each measure around a kilogram and, once used, form a mesh network, exchanging radio signals as they move apart. over a period of three to four months.

The satellites will also be equipped with special S-band radios capable of flight time range. That is, they can measure how long it will take a radio signal to travel to another satellite and kick back. The flight time of that signal can be used to measure the distance between the two satellites within half a meter.

All three satellites will be launched aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. As a testament to the size of small satellites, this flight will be a “rideshare” that will deliver dozens of microsatellites and nanosatellites for a number of commercial and government customers.

Think Manchester, who joined the CMU Robotics Institute last September, when he was associate professor of aeronautics and astronauts at Stanford University. His Stanford graduate student Max Holliday did much of the CubeSat construction work in his kitchen due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A CMU Ph.D. robotics student Kevin Tracy has been developing software for the experiment.

“It looks like there is a good future here for stuff like this,” Manchester said of CMU, referring to two CMU lunar rovers now awaiting launch and further research related to space at university and in Pittsburgh.

While he has his own training in aeronautics – the V-R3x is the third space trip for which he was chief investigator – Manchester stressed that joining the Robotics Institute makes sense perfect because of the robotic overlap.

“Spaceships are robots too,” he said.

The V-R3x CubeSats will be placed in polar orbit, which means they will fly over Pittsburgh about twice a day, 12 hours apart. Manchester said it hopes to set up a ground station at CMU to communicate with the satellites, although it acknowledged that the ground stations used for the mission have little.

“The satellites wake up and do the thing independently,” he explained. “Mostly we need to make sure we get their data downloaded.”

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