Autonomous satellite formation assembly and reconfiguration with gravity fields

Spacecraft formation flight may increase data coverage area and accuracy for a myriad of space-based experiments. To prevent ground operations support from scaling with number of satellites, we propose a control architecture that describes a formation as a virtual body, such that the operator controls the group as if it were a single entity. We overview the components of a satellite formation flying architecture then outline a constrained multi-agent planning approach to decompose the specified formation geometry into an optimized set of synchronized satellite waypoint sequences. To illustrate our approach, we describe a two-satellite planar Earth-orbiting formation for far-field interferometry and show results from path optimization for circular and elliptical orbits.