Artists impression of NASA’s Starling swarm constellation.
Credits: NASA/Conceptual Image Lab/Ross Walter

This week constellations have been in the news, with NASA’s Starling swarm satellites being launched, and China announcing it has started construction of a Very Low Earth orbiting constellation.

New Launches

On Wednesday, Rocket Labs successfully launched seven satellites from its Electron rocket which took off from New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula. Rocket Labs is well known for giving each of its missions quirky names and this one was no different, being named ‘Baby Come Back’; this was given as the company was attempting to recover Electron’s first stage from the ocean for the first time, as a step towards Electron becoming a reusable rocket – and they were successful as their own tweet said ‘Baby Came Back’!

This is an important step for Rocket Labs as they’re currently the only competitor to SpaceX for the western space community, as we discussed last week. The seven satellites the launch put into space were:

• Four satellites for NASA’s Starling Mission, this is a multi-CubeSat demonstrator mission focussing on the potential for autonomous swarm technologies. Swarms are satellites that co-operate with each other on their own, without the need from any human intervention from mission control. The mission is expected to last at least six months, and will be spaced around 65 km apart at an altitude of around 570 km. The swarm is expected to test different formations and various technologies to give a better understanding of what such synchronised satellites can do in terms of swarm manoeuvre planning and execution, communications networking, relative navigation, and autonomous coordination. Towards the end of the mission, it is expected to partner with SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation to test advanced space traffic management techniques between autonomous spacecraft operated by different organizations.
• Space Flight Laboratory Telesat’s LEO 3 demonstration satellite that will provide continuity for customer and ecosystem vendor testing campaigns following the decommissioning of Telesat’s Phase 1 LEO satellite.
• Two satellites for Spire Global, each was carrying their Global Navigation Satellite System Radio Occultation (GNSS-RO) payload to replenish its constellation of more than 100 multipurpose satellites. The satellites provide global weather data using radio frequency signals that are used in weather models to improve the accuracy of forecasts.

New Constellations

China has begun building the satellites for what it describes as a very low Earth Orbiting constellation, also referred as to ultra-low, according to the developer, China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation.

The constellation is expected to be at least 300 satellites in total when fully deployed in 2030, with the first satellites launched later this year, nine more in 2024, reaching a 192 strong constellation by 2027. These satellites will operate at altitudes below 300 km, and to give context the SpaceX Starlink satellites orbit it around 550 km and these are regularly visible from Earth with the naked eye.

The constellation will provide communication services and optical remote sensing data, offering a global response capability of less than 15 minutes. The remote sensing functions are described as ‘near-observation’, rather than Earth Observation and are expected to deliver 0.5 m spatial resolution. As the satellites are so close to the planet, the constellation potentially offers data at a lower cost, higher temporal resolution and with reduced transmission delays.

Summary

Evolution is a theme you often hear from the space industry, and this week is no different. Plans to have satellites at lower altitudes and have them make decisions without human intervention are evolution’s, and it will be interesting to see how these concepts develop.