Distributed computing for formation flying missions

There is a continuing trend in the space community to reduce costs involved in space missions. Miniaturization has been the primary method that was deployed for reducing space mission costs. This is now changing, due to the recent advancements in technology that enable advanced mission architectures namely, distributed spacecraft missions. Several spacecraft flying in close formations would collaboratively achieve the mission aims at lower costs and with enhanced reliability compared to larger single platform missions. Distributed algorithms have been proposed for use on-board these missions for coordination and control purposes. No work has been done to implement a distributed system at the lower levels of abstraction. This paper proposes the deployment of distributed computing on-board close formation flying missions. Two distributed computing paradigms namely, client-server and mobile agent, are analytically compared in view of close formation flying missions. As a result the mobile agent paradigm is proposed for the application in hand.