NASA Small Satellites to Demonstrate Swarm Communications and Autonomy

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The launch of the Nodes small satellites follows last month’s launch of the eight small satellites of the Edison Demonstration of Smallsat Networks (EDSN) mission, which was lost in the failure of the U.S. Air Force-led Operationally Responsive Space Office's ORS-4 mission. However, the Nodes spacecraft were developed at Ames by the same team that developed the EDSN spacecraft and many of the same capabilities planned for EDSN will be demonstrated in the Nodes mission, with additional software enhancements.

“The Nodes mission concept was an opportunity to leverage the excellent work done on EDSN, and extend the systems at a low-cost and effort,” stated David Korsmeyer, director of engineering at Ames. “This is the value of the nanosat model of mission -- quickly adapt to new opportunities and leverage systems for incremental missions.”

Networked swarms of small satellites will open new horizons in astronomy, Earth observation and solar physics. Their range of applications includes multi-satellite science missions, the formation of synthetic aperture radars for Earth sensing systems, as well as large aperture observatories for next-generation telescopes. They can also serve to collect science measurements distributed over space and time to study the Earth, the Earth’s magnetosphere, gravity field, and Earth-Sun interactions.

The Nodes project is sponsored by the SSTP, a program within NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, and received additional funding from the Ames Research Center.

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