The Orion Microsatellite Mission: A Testbed for Command, Control, and Communications for Formation Fleets

The Orion microsatellite, under development at Stanford University, will fly along with two other Stanford satellites ("Emeralds") as part of a NASA-funded project. The primary objective is to demonstrate, for the first time, the use of carrier-phase differential GPS (CDGPS) for the relative sensing, navigation and coordinated control of satellites to form a virtual spacecraft bus. Launch of this mission has been tentatively scheduled for late 2001. Formation flying offers an exciting new approach to conducting space science missions. Instead of employing a single, large satellite, a fleet of similar, smaller spacecraft is coordinated to perform mission-related tasks. While formation flying architectures have a significant amount of operational flexibility, the internal system complexity increases with the number of satellites in the fleet. In addition, constraints on satellite resources play a particularly key role. This paper is a summary of work conducted at Stanford to investigate the influence of resource constraints on mission and current-task planning. By making efficient use of knowledge associated with mission goals and operations, optimal strategies can be used to increase fleet life-cycle performance. In addition to discussing this topic, the role of the Orion mission as a testbed for these concepts is included.