Swarms of Femtosats for Synthetic Aperture Applications

The Silicon Wafer Integrated Femtosatellites (SWIFT) Swarm Project presents a new paradigm-shifting definition of spacecraft technology that can enable flight of swarms of fully capable femtosats. One of the most important applications of SWIFT is a distributed aperture array. New swarm Golay array configurations are introduced and shown to dramatically increase the effective diameter derived from optical performance metrics. A system cost analysis based on this comparison justifies deploying a large number of spacecraft for sparse aperture applications.