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This hands-on experience for students in designing, building and flying spacecraft is an important aspect of the investigation. It is also good, Reed pointed out, for students to learn to work closely with other organizations.
“That is the way it works in industry, with multiple entities involved,” Reed said. “It’s been a good collaboration, we’ve really enjoyed it and are thankful that NASA came up with the idea. The students have realized they have to work together and both craft have to work for the system to be successful.”
Dr. Glenn Lightsey, professor of aerospace engineering and head of the Texas Spacecraft Laboratory at The University of Texas, explained that it takes a lot of coordination for two spacecraft to share information and base their actions on the information they receive from each other.
“I have heard our two satellites described as ‘space tourists’ who will be taking pictures of each other and sending those pictures back to Earth,” he added.
Flight performance data from the investigation will indicate the readiness of technology development for autonomous rendezvous and docking objectives on future missions.
May explains that the work has four different objectives: controlling the attitude or orientation of the craft in three dimensions, navigation performance, communications and thruster performance. “The next step will be to actually perform an autonomous rendezvous and docking,” he said
That step, of course, will also require a lot of collaboration.
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