NASA Tests First-of-Its-Kind Spacecraft that Navigates without GPS
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4 Articles
The Starling mission demonstrates a system capable of calculating the position of a ship using other objects in orbit.
NASA tests first-of-its-kind spacecraft that navigates without GPS
NASA’s Starling mission has demonstrated a first-of-its-kind navigation system that lets a spacecraft determine its position in orbit by tracking other objects in space instead of relying on GPS. The system, called FALCON, uses cameras already aboard the spacecraft to identify other objects in orbit. It then compares those observations with a catalog of known satellites and orbital debris to work out where Starling is located. The technology cou…
NASA and Stanford University startup EraDrive have successfully tested a new autonomous navigation system, FALCON, on the Starling mission. The system, which tracks other satellites and space debris instead of GPS, can determine the spacecraft's location and refine the trajectories of objects in orbit without assistance from Earth.
NASA Demonstrates GPS-Free Autonomous Spacecraft Navigation System on Starling Swarm – SatNews
On August 17, 2026, NASA announced the successful flight demonstration of the Fast Autonomous Lost-in-space Catalog-based Optical Navigation (FALCON) system aboard the agency’s Starling CubeSat mission in low Earth orbit. […]
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