NASA satellites ace world's 1st 'lost-in-space' GPS-free navigation experiment

image via Space.com

August 25, 2026, 12:00 PM

• •FALCON stands for Fast Autonomous Lost-in-space Catalog-based Optical Navigation and was developed with industry partner EraDrive.
• •The system matched camera observations against an onboard catalog built from publicly available DoD records containing about 20,000 objects.
• •NASA said Starling autonomously refined orbital estimates for 200 objects over three days without ground-operator participation.
• •The self-orbit determination test is described by NASA as a first for spacecraft using optical cameras to navigate by relative position to other objects in space.
• •The Starling mission operates at about 350 miles (565 km) altitude and has been extended until at least 2028.

NASA's Starling mission has demonstrated a GPS-independent navigation experiment called FALCON using four cubesats in low Earth orbit. The system uses onboard cameras and a catalog of roughly 20,000 known objects to identify nearby satellites and calculate the spacecrafts' own orbit autonomously. NASA said the test also improved onboard predictions for other tracked objects and could aid space-traffic monitoring, collision avoidance and future missions beyond Earth orbit. The agency plans to extend the mission through at least 2028 as it studies applications for lunar, Martian and other deep-space operations.

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