Confluence of navigation, communication, and control in distributed spacecraft systems

This research details the development of technologies and methodologies that enable distributed spacecraft systems by supporting integrated navigation, communications, and control. The utility of operating at the confluence of navigation, communications, and control is established by demonstrating that such an approach enables fundamental operations needed to realize the promise of distributed spacecraft systems, including improved performance and robustness relative to monolithic space systems. Navigation is needed to support science data association and data alignment for distributed aperture sensing, multipoint observation, and co-observation of target regions. Communications enables autonomous distributed processing of science data. when required, and provides the infrastructure to support information exchange among space assets. Both navigation and communications, in turn, provide vital input to control methodologies for coordinating distributed autonomous assets at both the interspacecraft system level and the intraspacecraft affecter subsystem level. The development of a technological solution to implement these capabilities, the Crosslink Transceiver, is also described. The Crosslink Transceiver provides a navigation and communications capability that can be integrated into a developing autonomous command and control methodology for distributed spacecraft systems. A small satellite implementation of the Crosslink Transceiver design is detailed, including baseline physical characteristics and fundamental performance requirements. The ability of the subsystem to support broad classes of distributed spacecraft campaigns is described.