Small satellites, a Martian helicopter and military monitoring are some of the trends to watch in the satellite industry, according to a “future trends” discussion in a major industry conference.
Several industry and government speakers spoke about these trends during the virtual Small Satellite Conference, including pre-recorded presentations released Saturday (Aug. 7) and a live question-and-answer session Tuesday (Aug. 10).
Ever since the first CubeSat mission launched into low Earth orbit nearly 20 years ago in June 2003, these small satellites have been immense “disruptors” in an industry then dominated by large machines. Canada has enjoyed some advantages of these cheaper satellites, for example, as it is easier for a country with a small (yet powerful) space industry to launch a smaller satellite due to reduced technology development and launch costs, for example.
Now these little satellites are pushing further into the solar system and are also beginning to deliver vital services, such as broadband in Canada’s north. Below is a brief summary of the trends to watch in the next decade, based on the presentations at the conference.
35 years of small satellites
As consultant Siegfried W. Janson (a former senior scientist with The Aerospace Corp.) reminded attendees, the first satellites – the Soviet Union’s Sputnik-1 in 1957 and NASA’s Explorer-1 in 1958 – were relatively small by today’s standards given the unreliability of the diminutive launchers available at the time. Satellite size increased as launchers grew in size and capability, fuelled by factors such as low interest rates and the 1960s “space race” between the two nations that attracted considerable government and military funding.
While only large satellites launched between 1970 and 1996, his research showed, microelectronics and new solar cell technologies allowed a refocus on even more powerful small satellites – the CubeSats, microsats and picosats launching regularly to orbit today. Since 1997, plans have been afoot for multiple satellite applications that are only now being realized to large commercial extent, such as Earth observation and broadband service for remote areas, he said.
The current trend is huge fleets of satellites equipped to carry services for different needs – a somewhat controversial thing because the same satellites could also pollute skies for astronomical observation and Indigenous sky stories, among other problems. Companies like SpaceX have pledged to work collaboratively with different communities on the problem.
Janson pointed to five things the community needs to work on: space traffic management to reduce collision risk, active orbital debris removal systems, expanding into higher alittudes to reduce crowding, planning to launch with sustainable fuels to reduce global warming, and redesigning upper stages and satellites for reuse after the end of their normal lifetimes.
In the Q&A session, Janson also said the community needs to consider radiation exposure on more vulnerable small satellites (especially those in the Van Allen Belt), downlinking issues from swarms of satellites and Moore’s Law, the computing rule of thumb that talks about the number of transistors on a microchip doubling about every two years, though the cost of computers is halved. “Computing is advancing, still. Moore’s Law hasn’t been an effective enemy quite yet. We’re at the point where we can create more data into light.”
State of NASA science with smallsats
For NASA, said Florence Tan – chair of the Small Spacecraft Coordination Group (SSCG) at NASA Headquarters – smallsats represent an opportunity to do low-cost missions, to train and develop the workforce, and to do technology demonstration missions ahead of more expensive endeavours. Tan noted the agency now has a range of missions across astrophysics, heliophysics, Earth observation and planetary studies (the Moon and Mars).
The agency is trying to take better advantage of CubeSat missions by moving away from larger 3U or 6U machines and pivot to constellations, Tan said. EELV Secondary Payload Adapter (ESPA) spacecraft are becoming more popular, too, for heliophysics and astrophysics missions; such missions can be launched alongside other spacecraft, lowering the cost.
NASA is also seeking autonomy in mission operations to reduce the risk (and cost) of including humans, Tan said. Further, the agency has a “new observing strategy” that would use machine learning for satellites to ferret out climate-related problems with vegetation (for example) to speed up climate response.
Tan was unavailable for the live question and answer session, but pointed out in her pre-recorded remarks that NASA has been doing its best to stay agile with all the industry changes. Alluding to past administrator Dan Goldin’s pledge to create “faster, better, cheaper” missions, she said small satellites are a form of – finally – realizing the idea that Goldin first proposed in the 1990s, setting off a series of low-cost planetary missions that only achieved partial success.
NASA, she said, has “adopted certain policies that will foster an environment that is more risk tolerant, like patch management, so that we can streamline the implementation of smallsats” – including Science Policy Directive 32 to enable rideshare or launch accommodation opportunities on those missions with excess capacity.
A responsive defense architecture
Detecting, tracking, identifying and dealing with threat systems such as missiles is the main focus of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Space Development Agency, said its director Derek Tournear in a pre-recorded presentation.
He described the “layered architecture” SDA plans to construct in space in the next few years that aims for this goal, including a communications transport system, an advanced missile tracking and warning system, and the ability to track targets regardless of weather (such as by using radar). Additionally, the architecture includes battle management, emerging capabilities like space situational awareness and the ability to do position, navigation and timing work in GPS-denied environments, he said.
In his follow-up Q&A discussion, Tournear said the goal is to have “hundreds and hundreds” of satellites of two types: one set that is more traditional (300 kg each) and one set commercially built that is of the smallsat type. The network evolves in tranches with upgrades scheduled every two years.
“We have these new capabilities of hundreds of new satellites providing these new capabilities, every two years like clockwork,” he explained. That is impossible in the old regime where you’re looking at these large satellites that are approaching at least single digit billions of dollars apiece. Now we’re talking about satellites that we can build for single digit millions, [and] we can build them in 18 to 24 months.”
Tournear said the early stages of these tranches is already in play, with experimental satellites launched a month ago to do laser communications demos and another one (aboard the Northrop Grumman Cygnus spacecraft that launched to the ISS Tuesday, Aug. 10) planned to collect overhead imagery. Tranche 0 of the planned architecture should launch in about 58 weeks, including 28 satellites – 20 data transport satellites for “low latency connectivity and direct connectivity directly to the warfighter,” along with eight infrared imagery satellites.
SDA plans to release a Tranche 1 request for proposals in a few weeks, around Aug. 31, for 150 satellites to improve the latency and tactical data. If the schedule holds, Tranche 0 should be operational in September 2022 and Tranche 1 in September 2024. SDA is working with its suppliers to establish standards and interoperability, Tournear noted.
He said the architecture represents a new standard for space that can quickly evolve, thanks to features such as autonomy and interoperability. “It’s different than the kind of mentality that has been dominated in the large space community where you plan things out, very sequenced for multiple days in advance to be able to go through your operations,” he said. “[Instead] we’re talking about a dynamic environment where you’re shifting – you’re obviously not flying the satellites like you do a helicopter, but you are shifting missions.”
European satellite autonomy
While the industry trend has been pivoting to microsatellites and picosatellites, the European Space Agency’s CubeSats are moving into the 12U architecture for advances in performance for operations, said Roger Walker, ESA’s technology CubeSat manager.
Launches of the 12U are planned in 2022 and 2024-5 for the GOMX-5 and M-ARGO missions, respectively. GOMX-5 is meant to demonstrate new technology for propulsion and high-speed communications, while M-ARGO (Miniaturised Asteroid Remote Geophysical Observers) will venture to an asteroid to learn more about its shape, mass, surface and mineralogy.
Walker’s pre-recorded presentation focused on on-board autonomy for CubeSats. He noted a reduction in space cost and launch cost, but said there are challenges. The ground segment does not scale with spacecraft size and mass, constellations must deal with operational complexity as the number of spacecraft increase, and deep-space missions require additional architecture such as large (and availability-constrained) ground station networks, precise navigation flight dynamics, and software to support mission-critical events.
ESA is currently shooting for an eventual Level 4 autonomy, which describes an on-board autonomy management system that allows the spacecraft “to continue mission operations and to survive critical situations without relying on ground segment intervention,” Walker’s slides state. But current systems are, in their best state, just starting to move into a semi-autonomous state, he said.
If ESA is able to make the jump, there will be benefits, such as in close proximity operations missions to assemble structures or service satellites. Technology development is ongoing in areas such as vision-based navigation and six-degree-of-freedom propulsion modules, along with communications, he noted. The upcoming Rendezvous Autonomous CubeSats Experiment will test out some of these ideas using two 6U CubeSats that will rendezvous and dock with each other. Launch is expected in Q1 2024.
In the live Q&A, Walker said the program is at an exciting pivot point and he is looking forward to some future developments. “We’re looking at turning the focus also to the software side, and starting to introduce things like artificial intelligence and deep neural networks to assist in the autonomy,” he said. But he also warned that as the sizes of constellations increase, the inherent complexity of hundreds or thousands of satellites increases opportunities for failure and for collisions, pointing to other capabilities that need to be developed in terms of bringing those satellites back to Earth to clean up the space environment.
Ingenuity Martian helicopter
The success of the ongoing Ingenuity helicopter flight campaign proves that small drones have the reach, range and resolution to do planetary missions, said Bob Balaram, chief engineer for the project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in a pre-recorded presentation.
He described the architecture of Ingenuity in a pre-recorded presentation. The drone includes an ultra-safe battery pack, a custom energy-absorbing coating to harvest the sun’s warm, gas gap insulation as a substitution for aerogel, and a heater to survive cold nights, among other features. Like a CubeSat, it runs on a high-performance cell-phone processor chip and it includes an open-source flight software framework running on Linux. No GPS is on board, but there is a navigation camera, accelerometers, gyro and a laser altimeter.
As of Aug. 4, Ingenuity has made 11 flights and it has been hopping between locations since May, according to JPL data. NASA has said Ingenuity acts as a sort of preliminary scout for future Mars explorers, which may use drones to look ahead of rover or astronaut pathways.
In the live Q&A, Balaram joked that he “snuck into” a small satellite conference with the excuse that his little helicopter behaves much like a satellite. More seriously, however, he said Ingenuity provides valuable lessons learned for the smallsat community. “The same pressures on miniaturization, the same pressures on trying to make them small and functional, that was our experience,” he said. “The presentation talks to the journey of how we got to that point of nailing this first-of-a-kind system. No one’s ever flown a powered aircraft on any other planet.”
Balaram noted that for all the testing in the world, there were still unknowns – modeling was an estimate that turned out well, especially when it came to predicting high winds (which were difficult to test on Earth.) “We only tested to about 11 meters per second, and we’ve been flying in winds that have been much higher without any problems,” he said. “The spacecraft has held up extremely well, and it seems to be matching a lot of our model predictions. It gives us a lot of confidence in looking at the next-generation design.”