[[{“value”:”
SAN FRANCISCO – EraDrive, a Stanford spinoff, won a $1 million NASA contract to detect, identify and track space objects.
It was the first contract for the Palo Alto, California, startup founded earlier this year by Space Rendezvous Laboratory (SLAB) director Simone D’Amico, Justin Kruger, SLAB postdoctoral fellow, and Sumant Sharma, a SLAB alum and former autonomy lead at urban air mobility startup Wisk, a Boeing subsidiary.
“EraDrive develops self-driving technology for spacecraft with the goal to endow every spacecraft with autonomy capabilities from rendezvous and proximity operation, on-orbit servicing, assembly and manufacturing, all the way to space-situational awareness, space-traffic monitoring and management,” D’Amico said. “Basically, EraDrive makes not only every spacecraft fly autonomously but makes them aware of their surroundings.”
Under the sole-source NASA contract, EraDrive will develop software and services to track satellites and orbital debris with star trackers on NASA’s Starling spacecraft swarm. SLAB software for the Starling Formation-Flying Optical Experiment calculates the orbits of the four Starling cubesats and objects that pass within the field of view of the onboard star trackers.
Grand vision
EraDrive builds on D’Amico’s work at Stanford, where he is an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics and SLAB founding director. Prior to Stanford, D’Amico, helped design, develop and operate formation-flying spacecraft and rendezvous missions at the German Space Agency DLR.
Although much of EraDrive’s initial technology has been flight-proven, the company has a grand vision for enhancing satellite performance and autonomy for the 30,000 to 50,000 satellites expected to be in orbit in 2030. That vision includes development of “super star trackers,” similar to high-dynamic-range fisheye cameras for small satellites.
“All these proposed megaconstellations require a level of performance that only autonomy at the edge can solve,” Sharma said. “Each satellite needs to be in a very specific relative orientation and position to make the entire constellation work. If you have a human in the loop or teams of people in the loop deciding what each satellite needs to do, then it cannot scale.”
In addition, EraDrive technology promises to reduce collision risks and enhance national security by revealing the orbit of any satellite that may pose a threat to other spacecraft, D’Amico said. Autonomous vision-based navigation also frees satellites from reliance on the Global Positioning System or ground stations for position, navigation and timing information, he added.
Imagery windfall
The real promise lies in the proliferation of EraDrive technology to make satellites “aware of their surroundings and give them the ability to navigate and control their motion relative to other space assets,” D’Amico said. Precise tracking of other spacecraft will enable in-space servicing, space-based solar power generation and precision remote sensing, he added.
If widely adopted, EraDrive payloads onboard satellites would produce extensive on-orbit imagery and data.
“The potential to leverage that data is huge,” Kruger said. “The unprecedented coverage and resolution of this imagery will open many doors — not only for autonomy on the individual satellite level, but for modeling, analyzing and managing the entire space domain on an entirely new level.”
“}]]
Source: Read More