Butler Hine Ocala Evening lecture

Technological advancements across the small satellite community have enabled new approaches to complex, large scale missions. Multi-spacecraft geometries of constellations, clusters, and swarms are being developed to undertake a variety of defense, scientific, and commercial missions. These missions leverage groups of small satellites working together as a system. This lecture will discuss the technology advancements being used for spacecraft swarm missions, and how those are being deployed, tested, and adopted into future missions. Two missions serve as current examples of the development and use of swarm technology: the Starling Technology Mission and the HelioSwarm Science Mission. Starling is a technology demonstration mission launched last year and flying in space now testing key swarm technologies. HelioSwarm, currently in development, is a multi-spacecraft swarm science mission that will transform our understanding of space plasma turbulence. These are pathfinding missions that enable future large scientific and commercial swarms.

Dr. Hine is an active space flight project manager at NASA Ames Research Center. He is currently the Project Manager for the HelioSwarm mission, which will lead to understanding the cascade and dissipation of energy in turbulent magnetized plasmas by using a novel swarm of spacecraft to investigate the physics of turbulence. He was previously the Project Manager for the LADEE mission, a Lunar science orbiter which launched in 2013 and successfully completed its mission in 2014. LADEE measured Lunar dust and examined the Lunar exosphere near its pristine state, prior to future significant human activity. LADEE also tested an optical communications payload from the Moon, which is an important technology enabling high-bandwidth communications links for future planetary missions. Prior to this, Dr. Hine managed the Small Spacecraft Division at NASA ARC, which developed ways to build low-cost, high-performance spacecraft to enable future NASA missions. He has also managed various NASA programs, such as the Robotic Lunar Exploration Program, the Computing, Information, and Communications Technology Program, and the Intelligent Systems Program. His earlier NASA career includes directing the Intelligent Mechanisms Laboratory at NASA Ames Research Center, which pioneered the use of telepresence and virtual reality to control remote science exploration systems. Outside of NASA, Dr. Hine was President and CEO of a software start-up company which developed advanced visualization tools for managing large corporate networks.

Host or Publisher Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition