It was later confirmed that four Starling CubeSats were deployed from Rocket Lab’s Electron stage. Designed to work together as a “swarm”, the spacecraft has reached low Earth orbit to begin its mission to test autonomous positioning, networking, maneuvering and decision-making technologies.

A flock of Starlings will now open and try the ground theme first; a process that can happen overnight or over the next few days.

NASA’s Starling mission is a project that includes four CubeSats specifically designed to evaluate various technologies vital to facilitating future “swarm” missions. In the context of space exploration, the term “swarm” is used to describe a group of spacecraft that work together autonomously to achieve specific goals.

The Starling mission aims to demonstrate various advances in space technology, such as networking between spacecraft, relative navigation between onboard spacecraft, and planning and executing autonomous maneuvers. The mission will also experiment with distributed spacecraft autonomy, a concept that allows small spacecraft to respond independently based on their observations. This is an important step towards increasing the efficiency of future scientific missions.