NASA's Starling satellite navigates without GPS using nearby space objects

NASA said its Starling mission demonstrated FALCON, a system that determines a satellite's position by using other spacecraft and orbital debris as reference points instead of GPS. The joint flight experiment with EraDrive, a Stanford spinout, combined EraDrive's Era-Core flight software with Starling's star-tracker cameras and an onboard catalog of about 20,000 known space objects. NASA said FALCON improved the known orbits of more than 200 objects over a three-day period without ground-operator intervention, and that the onboard catalog updates produced more accurate object-position predictions than ground stations supplied. Later this year Starling's four-spacecraft swarm will share tracking information to refine positions.