Description: The relative accessibility of launching SmallSats into LEO offers an opportunity to both commercial and government organizations to provide high-quality services and conduct cutting-edge research at the cost of a large increase in the number of objects in LEO. More objects in LEO results in more conjunction alerts, which will eventually overwhelm human operators. We propose to develop a swarm coordination and control system called Coordinated Autonomous Debris AvoidaNCE (CADANCE) which will run on every SmallSat in a swarm and enable the swarm to autonomously avoid debris and other satellites. Our proposed innovation builds on existing technology that Stottler Henke has developed, creating an architecture and set of software methods that will achieve the goal of reactive management over a swarm of SmallSats. The proposed innovations are specifically based on our Smart COordination of Unmanned Teams (SCOUT) command and control framework, originally developed for NASA (and demonstrated to NASA stakeholders in flight on actual UVs). Our solution will combine case-based reasoning, automated probability of collision computations, and trajectory optimization to create a system that can handle reactive control of heterogeneous teams of SmallSats. In Phase I, we will adapt SCOUT and integrate it with the collision computation and trajectory optimization components to develop an initial prototype system. We will prove the feasibility of the prototype in Phase I by testing it against an existing SmallSat simulation. We will also research the CADANCE integration requirements to understand the requirements for deploying it with the ultimate SmallSat actuation, sensing, communication, and other hardware and software systems.

Benefits: Any NASA SmallSat or CubeSat swarm is a good candidate for deploying CADANCE. For example, NASA’s SunRISE SmallSats are a set of six small satellites that will work together to create a large space telescope that can use CADANCE to provide the capability to keep the SunRise satellites in formation, avoid mission disruptions, and reduce the likelihood of conjunctions. CADANCE can bring standardization and predictability to SmallSat collision avoidance.

Non-NASA commercial applications for CADANCE include satellites that provide services like the Starlink internet constellation and science satellites like Planet Labs' fleet of 200 Earth-imaging satellites. CADANCE will provide the opportunity to increase the number of these commercial satellites while reducing the possibility of collisions, all without significant impact to mission goals.