Special Theme
In the Earth’s atmosphere, small aerial drones and Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) operating in autonomous swarms have been matured and fully deployed in the civil, defence and industrial/commercial sectors for a diverse range of applications since a few years. Further use cases are emerging rapidly and disrupting these sectors significantly.
High performance embedded systems, miniaturised navigation sensors and propulsion, intra-swarm communications/ranging, distributed control/reconfiguration and artificial intelligence have been key enabling technologies combined together synergistically to field multi-agent systems successfully achieving their mission objectives. Such swarms can be operated in isolation, or be embedded within multi-layer systems of systems architectures capable of achieving higher level strategic goals.
In the space domain, the first autonomous swarms based on low-cost small satellites have been recently demonstrated successfully in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), along with precise formation flying between two small spacecraft in Highly Elliptical Orbit (HEO), thus opening up the potential for future swarm applications. Numerous swarm missions are now under development and planned for launch in LEO, HEO and Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO) in the coming years with applications including Earth observation, space science, and space weather. Swarms in Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) are also under study for EO science, telecom and defence applications.
Beyond Earth orbit, the first deep space “swarm” of CubeSats are also on their way to explore an asteroid for planetary defence purposes, and other deep space/beyond LEO small spacecraft swarms are under design and development for launch in the late 2020s to mid-2030s. The first concepts of lunar and Mars orbiting swarms are also starting to be explored for the first time, as larger carrier vehicles providing transportation and communication/navigation services are being defined for implementation.
Apart from swarms of distributed small spacecraft, advanced mission concepts under study also include so-called aggregated swarms where multiple small spacecraft autonomously rendezvous and dock together or to a central hub in order to build up a large in-space assembly, such as a telescope or antenna, potentially in combination with other In-Space Assembly and Manufacturing (ISAM) techniques, for example Additive Layer Manufacturing of booms and struts/trusses combined with robotics.
With autonomous swarms of small spacecraft set to disrupt how we design, develop and operate space systems, this special 4S theme aims to address swarm mission applications and design/analysis, autonomous system capabilities, key enabling technologies and flight demonstrations. Authors are invited to submit an abstract on the special theme by addressing any of the aspects reported above.