F6-CAPSat: A Picosat for System F6 Adjunct Interfacing

Multiple government and commercial organizations are currently exploring space missions involving several spacecraft operating in formations or clusters. Many of these systems involve gathering data from distributed sources to support mission objectives. This necessitates an inter-spacecraft communications architecture sufficient to pass data and commands across the system elements, as well as capability to process or operate on remote data. A significant simplification of this framework is achieved by enabling remote and/or collective data operations in a diverse multi-spacecraft system through an innovative, common software application set. The crux of this SBIR innovation is the common software application set that supports a diverse array of space vehicles and vehicle payloads. This software innovation facilitates disaggregation through data and computational resource sharing across disparate vehicles, enabling cluster/formation flight of spacecraft with vastly different capabilities and sizes. It creates a new mission class through the use of minimally-capable sensorcraft, a new, low-cost mission class that exploits computational resources from larger cluster spacecraft. This virtual connection with the larger spacecraft in the cluster allows the sensorcraft to be much more capable with lower size weight and power.