No, it's not time for lightsaber practice: This is a test of SPHERES, volleyball-sized satellites that have flown on board the International Space Station since May 2006.
SPHERES – the acronym stands for Synchronized Position, Hold, Engage, and Reorient Experimental Satellites – is a NASA- and Darpa-funded effort to test formation flying and autonomous docking for future satellites. (You can read more about the project, developed at the MIT Space Systems Laboratory, here.) Now Darpa wants to use SPHERES as an experiment in crowdsourcing.
In a solicitation posted Tuesday, the Pentagon's far-out science arm said it wanted would sponsor an "open-innovation approach" to developing algorithms for controlling SPHERES. According to the request for information, "participation in the innovation process would be open to groups numbering in the hundreds, to thousands, to possibly millions of people worldwide." It's Darpa's second dip into crowdsourced waters; last month, you'll recall, an MIT team won a $40,000 Darpa challenge to find 10 red balloons, placed around the country.
If I'm reading this correctly, Darpa wants to leverage SPHERES to get kids interested in science and technology. The project would have a "substantial science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education component, ideally applicable to a broad range of age levels."
Among other things, Darpa is interested in contests, cash prizes, viral marketing campaigns and other ventures that would get people interested in developing spacecraft cluster control algorithms for real, on-orbit satellites. Tentatively, the agency plans to name one or more of the SPHERES satellites after a successful responder. That sounds like a challenge for our readers: To get a SPHERES satellite named after Danger Room! I'm willing to offer up some awesome defense swag to the winner ...
