NASA Postdoctoral Program - Federated Communications Relays for Deep Space Exploration

The NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) offers unique research opportunities to highly-talented scientists to engage in ongoing NASA research projects at a NASA Center, NASA Headquarters, or at a NASA-affiliated research institute. These one- to three-year fellowships are competitive and are designed to advance NASA's missions in space science, Earth science, aeronautics, space operations, exploration systems, and astrobiology. This specific research opportunity focuses on swarms of cooperative small satellites serving as relays for critical flight operations in deep space. The research involves studying distributed coordination of satellite swarms for planetary communications traffic routing, particularly around Mars, to reduce the burden on DSN scheduling. The project explores frequency division (OMSPA) technology enabling multiple probes to communicate through relays received by one DSN antenna, extending DSN resources across more missions. Research will involve swarm and constellation optimization, communications protocol design, and simulation studies to inform architecture selection for future planetary missions supporting human exploration of Mars.