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Meeting	ACGS Committee Meeting 109 - Salt Lake City - March 2012
Agenda Location	9 SUBCOMMITTEE C – AVIONICS AND SYSTEM INTEGRATION 9.1 Multi-spacecraft Formation Program
Title	Multi-spacecraft Formation Program
Presenter	Fred Hadaegh
Affiliation	NASA JPL
Available Downloads*	none
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Abstract	An Overview of Multispacecraft Formation Flying at JPL Fred Y. Hadaegh Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology Pasadena, Ca. 91109 Hadaegh@jpl.nasa.gov Abstract Formation flying (FF) of multiple spacecraft is an emerging technology being considered by many space agencies around the world for a variety of applications. A key application of FF for space exploration is high precision alignment of distributed telescopes and interferometers to detect and image exoplanets. Other applications include the flight of very large number of tiny spacecraft for massively distributed sensing of the atmosphere, gravity detection, optical relays, and distributed antennae. These applications pose new and significant challenges to the underlying guidance and control system. FF requires new control systems and architectures, and greater levels of autonomy to meet required performance in the presence of environmental disturbances, plant uncertainties and more complex system interactions. This presentation will trace the motivation for these changes and will layout approaches taken to meet the new challenges. An overview of FF missions, JPL’s formation control robotic lab and distributed realtime control software lab, will be presented. A set of critical technologies that enable high precision formation flight of space telescopes and interferometers will be presented. In particular, novel architecture is introduced that will enable the fabrication of 100 gram-class spacecraft to be flown in swarms of 100s to 1000s in low Earth orbit. This SiliconWafer Integrated Femtosatellies (SWIFT) provides a paradigm-shifting approach to distributed spacecraft development, missions and applications.