GoKawiilNASA's Starling mission has reached another milestone in autonomous spaceflight by demonstrating a system that can determine a satellite's orbital position using other objects in space as reference points rather than depending on an external navigation network.
The technology, called FALCON (Fast Autonomous Lost-in-space Catalog-based Optical Navigation), is designed to help spacecraft operate with greater independence. Such capabilities could become increasingly important as NASA pursues missions farther from Earth, including lunar satellite swarms, distributed science missions, and future human exploration.
Navigating Space Without GPS
Satellites near Earth commonly rely on GPS for navigation, but those signals may be weak, unreliable, or unavailable around the Moon and in deep space. FALCON offers an alternative by allowing spacecraft to determine where they are using what they can observe around them.
The FALCON payload is a joint flight experiment developed by NASA and EraDrive, a startup that emerged from Stanford University. The system combines EraDrive's Era-Core flight software and embedded algorithms with Starling's cameras and an onboard catalog of known satellites. Together, these tools enable GPS-independent navigation while also helping the spacecraft track activity and objects in its surroundings.
"FALCON is yet another success for the Starling demonstration mission. The results from FALCON can have far-reaching implications for on-orbit space-traffic monitoring, collision avoidance, and alternative navigation," said Roger Hunter, program manager for NASA's Small Spacecraft and Distributed Systems program at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. "The number of 'firsts' from Starling just keeps growing."
Using Satellites and Debris as Reference Points
The FALCON demonstration evaluated two related capabilities using Starling's onboard star tracker cameras. These cameras are standard spacecraft instruments that detect bright objects in space and help determine a spacecraft's orientation and position.
During position, navigation, and timing experiments, FALCON identified objects seen by Starling's cameras, including other spacecraft and orbital debris, and compared them with a publicly available catalog of known space objects maintained by the U.S. Department of War. Once the observed objects were identified and verified, FALCON used them as reference points to calculate Starling's orbit.
A separate set of experiments tested whether the spacecraft could improve orbital estimates for the objects it observed. Mission controllers loaded a catalog containing approximately 20,000 space objects and their predicted orbits onto Starling.
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